While making a point of not watching the news the other evening, I passed by the TV set and double-took the screen image of Oliver Stone speaking with some entertainment reporter. I grabbed the remote control and un-muted the sound just in time to hear the filmmaker offer the beginnings of a remark wherein he referenced the past. He said, "At the time, I was a hotshot director. . . " That was all I heard of what he said because the impact of those few words temporarily buried me. "At the time"? Granted, the nature of Stone's movies changed a bit after 1999's Any Given Sunday. For many people in the movie business. teaming Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx and Dennis Quaid in what is arguably the most authentic football movie every made would have been a career in and of itself. Granted, in the previous twenty-one years, Oliver Stone had written the screenplays for the Turkish prison film Midnight Express, the action thriller Conan the Barbarian, and the gangster epic Scarface. He directed the political experiences Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, Nixon, and Natural Born Killers. He exploded the Sixties with Born on the Fourth of July and The Doors. In case you may not have been copied on the memo, he also produced The People versus Larry Flynt, The Joy Luck Club and Heaven and Earth. Men with similarly impressive resumes (few as they may be) never refer to their successes in the past tense, even though the quality of their recent work would make such self-deprecation more than merely appropriate. DePalma, Spielberg, Scorsese, Burton, Coppola, Lucas--only one of whom might be considered among the most artistically viable directors of the last fifty years--and neither he nor the other five would, on penalty of death or public humiliation, whisper the suggestion that his best days just might possibly be in the past. True, Stone's demand at the box office was not served well with Alexander, W., or by his movies about Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, although I personally enjoyed these movies almost as much as I did the earlier classics. And with a new movie called Snowden being released in 2016, he is the furthest thing from being washed up.
One of the sources of conflict in Any Given Sunday (which my girlfriend Lisa Ann insists is her favorite Oliver Stone movie) is the strain between experienced age (in the form of Pacino) and inexperienced youth (Jamie Foxx). I could not help but think of Stone himself while watching Pacino in the role of coach Tony D'Amato, trying the explain to his third-string quarterback about the value of the game itself rather than the glorification of one sole player. The young player feels he is being condescended to, that Pacino's days of glory are over, that the game itself has changed to passes and high scores over strategies and teamwork. And because mocking the phoniness of cheap pop culture is one of the subtleties of the director's work, we suspect early on that Pacino will find a way to win out over the corporate hustlers who have corrupted the surface--rather than the essence--of the game of football.
Stone is our great cinematic mythologist. Like any artist, he knows his version of history may not be the same as that of those who traditionally inform the masses. But he understands the power of myth, the way stories get relayed over generations, how truth can become corrupted, of the essential nature of the counter-myth.
In Scarface, the counter-myth comes right out the chute when the criminals Fidel Castro kicked out of Cuba come drifting to the United States, specifically to the Miami area, celebrating their new freedom to struggle to the top of a criminal empire. The older brothers and sisters of those same Cubans worked their black magic in Stone's telling of the destruction of John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. A jagged though sturdy set of lines connect the hidden lies at the heart of America and the anti-Castro Cuban exiles form those lines, from the muscle boys who worked the mob's casinos when Cuba belonged to the United States (courtesy of the dictator Batista) through the mechanics who murdered JFK under the auspices of the CIA, right on through the burglars who violated the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, the Watergate hotel, the Brookings Institute, to those who guided the training of the Contras in Nicaragua. These unnumbered dots form invisible links bounding and bonding our collective consciousness, our Spiritus Mundi, as Yeats called it in "The Second Coming."
Martin Scorsese may have the market on the subjects of guilt and redemption, just as Francis Coppola may be the master of the Great Journey. Spielberg may do more with the Establishment message than many outside the Establishment have dreamed. While Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now and perhaps Schindler's List will forever serve to redefine our understanding of just how much can be done with the medium of cinema, so do movies such as JFK and Nixon redefine our understanding of how we got here as a people. The late Robert Altman did the same thing with MASH, Nashville, The Long Goodbye, 3 Women and The Player. Altman and Stone have been the great counter-mythologists of our time. These filmmakers and a few others I could mention (mostly from outside the United States) have reconstructed the nature of making movies in the same way that Method Acting and Stella Adler changed performance. That is to say, contemporary movies are unthinkable without them.
I have heard Stone refer to his stylistic efforts as a kind of Cubism, in the Picasso sense of the term. Quick shots interspersing present and past, color and B&W, clarity and graininess, fact and theory create the emotional rhythm of movies such as JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon. And if Cubism dictates the geometric conflux of a piece of art, such as a movie, then it relies on the emotional wallop for its initial success. The actor Tommy Lee Jones has referred to NBK as Art on a par with Guernica. From the point of view of substance, that's ridiculous. The former is satire, the latter expose. But from the POV of style, Jones hit the target square in the lens with his observation.
Oliver Stone has no need for me to come to his defense. He might even resent the effort. But after the System--the Beast--launched its attack against him for his stories of Kennedy and Nixon and contemporary culture, he likely grew weary from the fight. Reading and watching interviews he granted from 1992 through 1996, you can observe how well-informed and attuned to specificity his thinking had become. This was a man who, in his youth, could have followed an easy path toward becoming an effete snob. Instead, he went to Vietnam. He could have continued scripting action adventure thrillers. He could have used his education and experiences to manufacture product that would deteriorate the gray matter of the movie-going audiences. Instead, he pounded his chest, let out a roar, and invited us to question all the lies that are our lives. Sometimes, as with The Doors, this teeters on the razor's edge between the boredom of overkill and the fascination of excess. Most of the time, however, his thumping, roaring and invitations make us obsessed with our own discomfort.
History is a series of overlapping stories about the uses to which great power is put. Myths are explanations for how this is possible. Cinema is the self-gazing set of eyes that merge history with mythology. How do we see ourselves up on that colossal screen? Are we some freak of nature superhero whose motivations are interesting yet murky? Or are we Barry in Talk Radio, trying to figure out why people need him and need to destroy him? Are we Jim Garrison in JFK, aware that "Something is happening but you don't know what it is"? Are we Pat Nixon, playing both wife and surrogate mother to the President of the United States? And is there not some sense of liberation in that identification with those characters? When these characters agonize from their fall from grace, our identification is called catharsis. I don't know how to get catharsis from Spider-Man (although not from lack of trying). But I feel it in the best movies by Oliver Stone. I feel it with repeated viewings.
Here's hoping you are the same.
One of the sources of conflict in Any Given Sunday (which my girlfriend Lisa Ann insists is her favorite Oliver Stone movie) is the strain between experienced age (in the form of Pacino) and inexperienced youth (Jamie Foxx). I could not help but think of Stone himself while watching Pacino in the role of coach Tony D'Amato, trying the explain to his third-string quarterback about the value of the game itself rather than the glorification of one sole player. The young player feels he is being condescended to, that Pacino's days of glory are over, that the game itself has changed to passes and high scores over strategies and teamwork. And because mocking the phoniness of cheap pop culture is one of the subtleties of the director's work, we suspect early on that Pacino will find a way to win out over the corporate hustlers who have corrupted the surface--rather than the essence--of the game of football.
Stone is our great cinematic mythologist. Like any artist, he knows his version of history may not be the same as that of those who traditionally inform the masses. But he understands the power of myth, the way stories get relayed over generations, how truth can become corrupted, of the essential nature of the counter-myth.
In Scarface, the counter-myth comes right out the chute when the criminals Fidel Castro kicked out of Cuba come drifting to the United States, specifically to the Miami area, celebrating their new freedom to struggle to the top of a criminal empire. The older brothers and sisters of those same Cubans worked their black magic in Stone's telling of the destruction of John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. A jagged though sturdy set of lines connect the hidden lies at the heart of America and the anti-Castro Cuban exiles form those lines, from the muscle boys who worked the mob's casinos when Cuba belonged to the United States (courtesy of the dictator Batista) through the mechanics who murdered JFK under the auspices of the CIA, right on through the burglars who violated the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, the Watergate hotel, the Brookings Institute, to those who guided the training of the Contras in Nicaragua. These unnumbered dots form invisible links bounding and bonding our collective consciousness, our Spiritus Mundi, as Yeats called it in "The Second Coming."
Martin Scorsese may have the market on the subjects of guilt and redemption, just as Francis Coppola may be the master of the Great Journey. Spielberg may do more with the Establishment message than many outside the Establishment have dreamed. While Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now and perhaps Schindler's List will forever serve to redefine our understanding of just how much can be done with the medium of cinema, so do movies such as JFK and Nixon redefine our understanding of how we got here as a people. The late Robert Altman did the same thing with MASH, Nashville, The Long Goodbye, 3 Women and The Player. Altman and Stone have been the great counter-mythologists of our time. These filmmakers and a few others I could mention (mostly from outside the United States) have reconstructed the nature of making movies in the same way that Method Acting and Stella Adler changed performance. That is to say, contemporary movies are unthinkable without them.
I have heard Stone refer to his stylistic efforts as a kind of Cubism, in the Picasso sense of the term. Quick shots interspersing present and past, color and B&W, clarity and graininess, fact and theory create the emotional rhythm of movies such as JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon. And if Cubism dictates the geometric conflux of a piece of art, such as a movie, then it relies on the emotional wallop for its initial success. The actor Tommy Lee Jones has referred to NBK as Art on a par with Guernica. From the point of view of substance, that's ridiculous. The former is satire, the latter expose. But from the POV of style, Jones hit the target square in the lens with his observation.
Oliver Stone has no need for me to come to his defense. He might even resent the effort. But after the System--the Beast--launched its attack against him for his stories of Kennedy and Nixon and contemporary culture, he likely grew weary from the fight. Reading and watching interviews he granted from 1992 through 1996, you can observe how well-informed and attuned to specificity his thinking had become. This was a man who, in his youth, could have followed an easy path toward becoming an effete snob. Instead, he went to Vietnam. He could have continued scripting action adventure thrillers. He could have used his education and experiences to manufacture product that would deteriorate the gray matter of the movie-going audiences. Instead, he pounded his chest, let out a roar, and invited us to question all the lies that are our lives. Sometimes, as with The Doors, this teeters on the razor's edge between the boredom of overkill and the fascination of excess. Most of the time, however, his thumping, roaring and invitations make us obsessed with our own discomfort.
History is a series of overlapping stories about the uses to which great power is put. Myths are explanations for how this is possible. Cinema is the self-gazing set of eyes that merge history with mythology. How do we see ourselves up on that colossal screen? Are we some freak of nature superhero whose motivations are interesting yet murky? Or are we Barry in Talk Radio, trying to figure out why people need him and need to destroy him? Are we Jim Garrison in JFK, aware that "Something is happening but you don't know what it is"? Are we Pat Nixon, playing both wife and surrogate mother to the President of the United States? And is there not some sense of liberation in that identification with those characters? When these characters agonize from their fall from grace, our identification is called catharsis. I don't know how to get catharsis from Spider-Man (although not from lack of trying). But I feel it in the best movies by Oliver Stone. I feel it with repeated viewings.
Here's hoping you are the same.
JFK
Here's the information on which we can all agree.
In 1959, a young ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald traveled to Moscow in what was then the USSR. He visited the American Embassy on a Saturday. He delivered to a Mr. Snyder his United States passport, stating that he wished to renounce his U.S. citizenship, that he planned to seek Russian citizenship and that it was his intent to give information he had acquired as a radar operator to the Soviets.
Although the Russians ultimately declined Oswald's request for citizenship, they did ship him off to Minsk where he became a well-paid factory worker. It was while in Minsk that he met his future wife Marina.
He worked at getting an exit visa for himself and Marina for nearly a year. When the two Oswalds shipped themselves to the USA in the spring of 1962, they were greeted by a member of the Traveler's Aid Society, Spas T. Rankin. Lee was debriefed by the FBi twice, but no charges were brought against him.
Meanwhile, back in the States, Lee Oswald held a number of different jobs, both in Fort Worth and in New Orleans. He applied for membership in something called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro outfit headquartered out of New York City. While in Louisiana, Oswald distributed FPCC leaflets, some of which had the address 544 Camp Street, which seems incongruous since the same office building had a second address: 531 Lafayette. Both addresses had the same entrance. The incongruity is that the latter was the address of one Guy Banister, a former ONI, former FBI man who operated a private detective agency, as well as a way-station for anti-Castro Cubans training to take back the island from "the tyrant." In other words, the presumably pro-Castro, pro-Soviet Lee Harvey Oswald was hanging out in an office run by a virulent anti-Castro ex-government agent.
This weirdness is compounded when we recall that during the summer of 1963, Oswald contacted one Carlos Bringuier, head of an anti-Castro outfit in New Orleans. Oswald wanted to provide Bringuier with support, including a copy of his Marine training manual. One can only imagine Carlos' chagrin when, the very next day, he found out that Oswald was distributing pro-Castro FPCC fliers on Canal Street. Carlos confronted Lee, the latter encouraging the former to "Go ahead, hit me," almost, as witnesses would later claim, as if Oswald wanted Bringuier to assault him.
(It has long been something more than a curiosity that when District Attorney Henry Wade was speaking at a press conference following the arrest of Oswald, he got the name of Oswald's committee wrong. He was correct by a man in the back of the room. That man said, "Henry, that's the Fair Play for Cuba Committee." That man's name was Jack Ruby, the same man who would soon gun down Oswald in front of twenty cops and the nation's television cameras. How would the owner of a local strip club know the correct name of Oswald's organization?)
On September 27, 1963, one of three things happened. (1) Oswald traveled to Mexico City; (2) someone impersonating Oswald traveled to Mexico City, or (3) Oswald and an impersonator traveled to Mexico City, although not necessarily together. While there, an attempt by one or more of these Oswald-ites tried to get visas allowing them to travel first to Cuba and then to the USSR. Both requests were denied. Because these requests were made at the Cuban and Soviet Embassies, respectively, the CIA was monitoring phone calls in and out, as well as photographing anyone who entered or left the buildings. The photos the CIA supplied both the Warren Commission and House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was clearly not Oswald. The transcripts of the phone conversations never once mention Oswald by name, although the inference is clear.
Shortly before Oswald's alleged trip to Mexico City, three men made a late night visit to an attractive woman named Sylvia Odio, whose father had been imprisoned by Castro for trying to overthrow his regime. Odio had founded a group called JURE (Junta Revolution). When the three men arrived (two Hispanics and one Anglo), the latter was introduced to Sylvia as "Leon Oswald." The men made her uncomfortable, so she asked them to leave. The next evening, one of the two Hispanics telephoned her, saying that Oswald was an ex-Marine who was on the side of JURE and who claimed the Cubans didn't have enough guts to kill Kennedy like they should have done after the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs.
What drives home the value of this information is that Sylvia Odio discussed all of this with several people weeks prior to the assassination of JFK.
Based on these as well as many other conflicting actions, it appears that at least one other person was impersonating Lee Oswald in the months prior to the murder of the president. It is also plausible that this impersonation was at least in part a means of "sheep-dipping" the patsy in advance. How far back that dipping may have gone is hard to say. It may well have preceded the young ex-Marine's stay in the Soviet Union.
On November 22, 1963, Lee Oswald was working at the Texas School Book Depository at 411 Elm Street in Dallas. His job was to stack and move boxes of books, a duty somewhat ill-befitting a former Marine and trained radar operator who had taken Russian language courses and who had been spending his off hours with neighbors Bill and Ruth Paine (he of Bell Helicopters) and George Demohrenschildt (a member of the White Russian community and former pro-Nazi). About what happened a little after twelve-thirty that afternoon, there are conflicting stories.
According to the official Warren Report, Oswald constructed a sniper's nest in the sixth floor of the Depository, ate a chicken sandwich while calmly waiting for the President's limousine to approach. The Warren version has it that Oswald and only Oswald fired three shots from a window there, using a Manlicher Carcano rifle. The first shot missed the vehicle entirely, striking the pavement near the Triple Underpass, a fragment of which pavement chipped off and struck the face of bystander James Tague. The second bullet penetrated Kennedy's throat from the rear, existed from the front, struck Texas Governor Connally from behind, puncturing his fifth rib, existing his chest, striking his right wrist, fracturing same, entering his right leg, and ending up in pristine condition on a stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital. The third and final shot, this report declares, was the fatal head shot that took Kennedy from behind, blowing his brains out in front of his wife and other witnesses.
The second official government investigation (HSCA) was far more interesting and certainly more provocative. These hearings were opened to a number of researchers and critics of the Warren Report. The findings of this investigation were:
Yet a third view has lingered. That view holds that Kennedy was most definitely murdered as the result of a conspiracy and that just possibly Oswald had been attempting to prevent the assassination and had been betrayed by the organizers of the actual plot.
All of this said, we are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of that terrible day in November. There have been already a number of books and movies which are, in one way or another, attempts to either clarify, muddy, or exploit the situation, not the least of which being the recent film Parkland, as well as the reissue of John Newman's invaluable if occasionally confusing Oswald and the CIA. One particularly bad movie that could have been excellent was Executive Action (1973) which sort of combined the Mark Lane view that members of government Intelligence were behind the plot with the Penn Jones Jr argument that a suspicious number of people connected with the assassination died soon after and under bizarre circumstances.
By far the best movie dealing with the subject remains Oliver Stone's JFK (1991). With a phenomenal all-star cast (Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Jay O. Sanders, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Gary Oldham, Laurie Metcalf, Joe Pesci, and Walter Matthau, and others), this incredible movie posits several workable theories, the connecting thread being motive, which in this case is a mix of Kennedy's National Security Action Memo 263 calling for the withdrawal of the first of one thousand troops from the imbroglio of Vietnam and his refusal to invade Cuba.
It really doesn't matter whether one believes in a conspiracy involving the assassination or not. What matters is that Stone's film is one of the most successful "art films" of all time. Part documentary, part drama, part real footage, part recreation, all of it intermingled strategically to persuade, yes, of course, but more importantly to drag us onto a twist of speedway suspense with genuine consequences. After all, if the solution to the puzzle of the murder of the thirty-fifth President of the United States remains, after five decades, in the words of likely conspirator David Ferrie, "a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma," then what can we know with certainty about our own day-to-day lives?
In 1959, a young ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald traveled to Moscow in what was then the USSR. He visited the American Embassy on a Saturday. He delivered to a Mr. Snyder his United States passport, stating that he wished to renounce his U.S. citizenship, that he planned to seek Russian citizenship and that it was his intent to give information he had acquired as a radar operator to the Soviets.
Although the Russians ultimately declined Oswald's request for citizenship, they did ship him off to Minsk where he became a well-paid factory worker. It was while in Minsk that he met his future wife Marina.
He worked at getting an exit visa for himself and Marina for nearly a year. When the two Oswalds shipped themselves to the USA in the spring of 1962, they were greeted by a member of the Traveler's Aid Society, Spas T. Rankin. Lee was debriefed by the FBi twice, but no charges were brought against him.
Meanwhile, back in the States, Lee Oswald held a number of different jobs, both in Fort Worth and in New Orleans. He applied for membership in something called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro outfit headquartered out of New York City. While in Louisiana, Oswald distributed FPCC leaflets, some of which had the address 544 Camp Street, which seems incongruous since the same office building had a second address: 531 Lafayette. Both addresses had the same entrance. The incongruity is that the latter was the address of one Guy Banister, a former ONI, former FBI man who operated a private detective agency, as well as a way-station for anti-Castro Cubans training to take back the island from "the tyrant." In other words, the presumably pro-Castro, pro-Soviet Lee Harvey Oswald was hanging out in an office run by a virulent anti-Castro ex-government agent.
This weirdness is compounded when we recall that during the summer of 1963, Oswald contacted one Carlos Bringuier, head of an anti-Castro outfit in New Orleans. Oswald wanted to provide Bringuier with support, including a copy of his Marine training manual. One can only imagine Carlos' chagrin when, the very next day, he found out that Oswald was distributing pro-Castro FPCC fliers on Canal Street. Carlos confronted Lee, the latter encouraging the former to "Go ahead, hit me," almost, as witnesses would later claim, as if Oswald wanted Bringuier to assault him.
(It has long been something more than a curiosity that when District Attorney Henry Wade was speaking at a press conference following the arrest of Oswald, he got the name of Oswald's committee wrong. He was correct by a man in the back of the room. That man said, "Henry, that's the Fair Play for Cuba Committee." That man's name was Jack Ruby, the same man who would soon gun down Oswald in front of twenty cops and the nation's television cameras. How would the owner of a local strip club know the correct name of Oswald's organization?)
On September 27, 1963, one of three things happened. (1) Oswald traveled to Mexico City; (2) someone impersonating Oswald traveled to Mexico City, or (3) Oswald and an impersonator traveled to Mexico City, although not necessarily together. While there, an attempt by one or more of these Oswald-ites tried to get visas allowing them to travel first to Cuba and then to the USSR. Both requests were denied. Because these requests were made at the Cuban and Soviet Embassies, respectively, the CIA was monitoring phone calls in and out, as well as photographing anyone who entered or left the buildings. The photos the CIA supplied both the Warren Commission and House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was clearly not Oswald. The transcripts of the phone conversations never once mention Oswald by name, although the inference is clear.
Shortly before Oswald's alleged trip to Mexico City, three men made a late night visit to an attractive woman named Sylvia Odio, whose father had been imprisoned by Castro for trying to overthrow his regime. Odio had founded a group called JURE (Junta Revolution). When the three men arrived (two Hispanics and one Anglo), the latter was introduced to Sylvia as "Leon Oswald." The men made her uncomfortable, so she asked them to leave. The next evening, one of the two Hispanics telephoned her, saying that Oswald was an ex-Marine who was on the side of JURE and who claimed the Cubans didn't have enough guts to kill Kennedy like they should have done after the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs.
What drives home the value of this information is that Sylvia Odio discussed all of this with several people weeks prior to the assassination of JFK.
Based on these as well as many other conflicting actions, it appears that at least one other person was impersonating Lee Oswald in the months prior to the murder of the president. It is also plausible that this impersonation was at least in part a means of "sheep-dipping" the patsy in advance. How far back that dipping may have gone is hard to say. It may well have preceded the young ex-Marine's stay in the Soviet Union.
On November 22, 1963, Lee Oswald was working at the Texas School Book Depository at 411 Elm Street in Dallas. His job was to stack and move boxes of books, a duty somewhat ill-befitting a former Marine and trained radar operator who had taken Russian language courses and who had been spending his off hours with neighbors Bill and Ruth Paine (he of Bell Helicopters) and George Demohrenschildt (a member of the White Russian community and former pro-Nazi). About what happened a little after twelve-thirty that afternoon, there are conflicting stories.
According to the official Warren Report, Oswald constructed a sniper's nest in the sixth floor of the Depository, ate a chicken sandwich while calmly waiting for the President's limousine to approach. The Warren version has it that Oswald and only Oswald fired three shots from a window there, using a Manlicher Carcano rifle. The first shot missed the vehicle entirely, striking the pavement near the Triple Underpass, a fragment of which pavement chipped off and struck the face of bystander James Tague. The second bullet penetrated Kennedy's throat from the rear, existed from the front, struck Texas Governor Connally from behind, puncturing his fifth rib, existing his chest, striking his right wrist, fracturing same, entering his right leg, and ending up in pristine condition on a stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital. The third and final shot, this report declares, was the fatal head shot that took Kennedy from behind, blowing his brains out in front of his wife and other witnesses.
The second official government investigation (HSCA) was far more interesting and certainly more provocative. These hearings were opened to a number of researchers and critics of the Warren Report. The findings of this investigation were:
- .A. Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at President John F. Kennedy. The second and third shots he fired struck the President. The third shot he fired killed the President
- B. Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy. Other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the President. Scientific evidence negates some specific conspiracy allegations
- C. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee was unable to identify the other gunmen or the extent of the conspiracy
- D. Agencies and departments of the U.S. Government performed with varying degrees of competency in the fulfillment of their duties. President John F. Kennedy did not receive adequate protection. A thorough and reliable investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination was conducted. The investigation into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate. the conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith, but presented in a fashion that was too definitive
Yet a third view has lingered. That view holds that Kennedy was most definitely murdered as the result of a conspiracy and that just possibly Oswald had been attempting to prevent the assassination and had been betrayed by the organizers of the actual plot.
All of this said, we are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of that terrible day in November. There have been already a number of books and movies which are, in one way or another, attempts to either clarify, muddy, or exploit the situation, not the least of which being the recent film Parkland, as well as the reissue of John Newman's invaluable if occasionally confusing Oswald and the CIA. One particularly bad movie that could have been excellent was Executive Action (1973) which sort of combined the Mark Lane view that members of government Intelligence were behind the plot with the Penn Jones Jr argument that a suspicious number of people connected with the assassination died soon after and under bizarre circumstances.
By far the best movie dealing with the subject remains Oliver Stone's JFK (1991). With a phenomenal all-star cast (Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Jay O. Sanders, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Gary Oldham, Laurie Metcalf, Joe Pesci, and Walter Matthau, and others), this incredible movie posits several workable theories, the connecting thread being motive, which in this case is a mix of Kennedy's National Security Action Memo 263 calling for the withdrawal of the first of one thousand troops from the imbroglio of Vietnam and his refusal to invade Cuba.
It really doesn't matter whether one believes in a conspiracy involving the assassination or not. What matters is that Stone's film is one of the most successful "art films" of all time. Part documentary, part drama, part real footage, part recreation, all of it intermingled strategically to persuade, yes, of course, but more importantly to drag us onto a twist of speedway suspense with genuine consequences. After all, if the solution to the puzzle of the murder of the thirty-fifth President of the United States remains, after five decades, in the words of likely conspirator David Ferrie, "a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma," then what can we know with certainty about our own day-to-day lives?
SOUTH OF THE BORDER
Given a bit of time, the proper alignment of circumstances, and the rigorous application of tenacity, the dispersed components of truth manifest themselves while oceans of aridity and disillusionment freeze in that instant of doubt. The connections among events, some real, others imagined, coalesce along the border and between breaths there emerges a blip, a flicker, a flash of recognition of a fist pounding the air as men and women gaze, as old people cry, as children utter nervous giggles. In that moment of incredulity, the universe explodes.
The universe laughs until its kidneys explode.
Have you ever noticed how ridiculous most politicians appear when they attempt to identify themselves with working people? Whether it is Michael Dukakis riding in an army tank, George H. W. Bush trying to buy something without cash, Mitt Romney arguing that he knows Detroit because his wife drives two Cadillacs, or Abraham Lincoln manufacturing much of his working-class childhood, the stench of the bovine defecation chokes us until we pass out from laughing. Yet, there is a scene in the Oliver Stone documentary South of the Border (2009) where president Hugo Chavez visits the community where he grew up. He hops on a bicycle in a staged attempt to amuse the crowd and the bicycle virtually snaps in half under his considerable weight. Can you imagine how a modern day American politico would handle this? The camera crews would be locked up, the crowd of onlookers quarantined, and the photographic equipment would be confiscated and destroyed. The Venezuelan leader handled things a bit differently. He laughed at himself, right on camera. He laughed and said that he would have to buy the kid who owned it a new bike. The moment was natural because it was true and because it was true it was beautiful.
To an extent, something that psychologists call the observer-expectancy effect may be happening here. After all, Chavez is no dummy and the presence of a renegade filmmaker such as Mr. Stone may have prompted some of the glad-handing scenes. Still, this monumental film of inspired counter-propaganda shines a rarefied light onto the fascinating Hugo Chavez and his presidency.
President Chavez, you see, is fighting against the effects of colonialism.
The last time the government of the United States identified anything explicitly as colonialism was when we still had the thirteen original colonies. From the time of the American Revolution onward, we have owned and operated much like our own former European masters, seeing the people of other countries as an ungrateful lot who have to be protected from their own worst impulses. Flash forward to South America, to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, to Evo Morales in Bolivia, to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina, to Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, Lula de Silva in Brazil, Rafeal Correa in Ecuador. These folks recognize the one-time colonial status of their countries because they know their history, they know the stories of Simon Bolivar, and they know, as did he, how to think in centuries. These folks are the formerly disaffected. They are women, the soldiers, the bishops, the metal workers, the trade unionists. They are the people who have suffered and who have grown from their suffering.
Oliver Stone spent time with each of the leaders mentioned above and his interviews with them, and with Raoul Castro of Cuba, are the superficial focal point of his fascinating documentary. History, however, is the real star of the show. It is a history that began with the dream of a united Latin America speaking with one voice in favor of its people and against the Europeans and their descendants.
The President of the United States, Barack Obama, came to that office at a most monumental time in world history. With leftist and populist movements celebrating their victories throughout South America, with nations paying off their debts to the International Monetary Fund and thereby freeing themselves to act in accordance with the best interests of the people of their countries rather than in the interests of financiers, and with a massively unpopular outgoing series of imperialist foreign policies from a previous administration, the proper alignment of circumstances appeared to be set in place.
For a long time I wondered why the ruling class in the United States--by which I mean the media, the banks, the oil companies--were so united in their opposition to Obama. After all, wasn't he simply a dark-skinned member of their own old boys club? Perhaps he was. But the attacks against Obama in this country stem from his refusal to endorse centuries of colonial efforts against the people of Latin America. Chavez himself told Stone that he hopes Obama will be another [Franklin] Roosevelt. He meant that statement in terms of U.S. domestic policy, but the reality is that Obama's policies regarding Latin America are closer to those of FDR than any president since World War II. Venezuela has oil, a lot of it. And when the oil companies in that country became nationalized, just as the sugar cane fields did in Cuba decades ago, that fact is upsetting to those who profit from the exploitation of natural resources. Nationalization is the opposite of privatization. And it is the latter practice that diverts wealth into the hands of a few, leaving billions of empty stomachs grumbling for crumbs. If that sounds hyperbolic, I apologize. You see, this film has that kind of an effect on me, in large part because, watching South of the Border, one is again reminded of the corruption of most of the global media empires. CNN does not have your best interests at heart. Certainly Fox does not. The less regressive (as opposed to the word of the moment "progressive") Current TV and MSNBC occasionally do but that's only because of the renegade work of the teams of Maddow and (formerly) Olbermann. And so this film demands that we think about the issues it raises. Stone himself argues in favor of the possibility of a "benign capitalism," rather than the overtly predatory version currently in place. Naturally, the movie does not explore what he thinks the components of such a system would be. That's because, in the final analysis, some type of leftward socialism is coming and he knows it. Obama is not a socialist. However, even that Harvard graduate is smart enough to recognize the wisdom of an old man, long dead, who said, "When a man senses the winds of change blowing, if he is wise he builds a windmill and not a wind block."
The universe laughs until its kidneys explode.
Have you ever noticed how ridiculous most politicians appear when they attempt to identify themselves with working people? Whether it is Michael Dukakis riding in an army tank, George H. W. Bush trying to buy something without cash, Mitt Romney arguing that he knows Detroit because his wife drives two Cadillacs, or Abraham Lincoln manufacturing much of his working-class childhood, the stench of the bovine defecation chokes us until we pass out from laughing. Yet, there is a scene in the Oliver Stone documentary South of the Border (2009) where president Hugo Chavez visits the community where he grew up. He hops on a bicycle in a staged attempt to amuse the crowd and the bicycle virtually snaps in half under his considerable weight. Can you imagine how a modern day American politico would handle this? The camera crews would be locked up, the crowd of onlookers quarantined, and the photographic equipment would be confiscated and destroyed. The Venezuelan leader handled things a bit differently. He laughed at himself, right on camera. He laughed and said that he would have to buy the kid who owned it a new bike. The moment was natural because it was true and because it was true it was beautiful.
To an extent, something that psychologists call the observer-expectancy effect may be happening here. After all, Chavez is no dummy and the presence of a renegade filmmaker such as Mr. Stone may have prompted some of the glad-handing scenes. Still, this monumental film of inspired counter-propaganda shines a rarefied light onto the fascinating Hugo Chavez and his presidency.
President Chavez, you see, is fighting against the effects of colonialism.
The last time the government of the United States identified anything explicitly as colonialism was when we still had the thirteen original colonies. From the time of the American Revolution onward, we have owned and operated much like our own former European masters, seeing the people of other countries as an ungrateful lot who have to be protected from their own worst impulses. Flash forward to South America, to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, to Evo Morales in Bolivia, to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina, to Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, Lula de Silva in Brazil, Rafeal Correa in Ecuador. These folks recognize the one-time colonial status of their countries because they know their history, they know the stories of Simon Bolivar, and they know, as did he, how to think in centuries. These folks are the formerly disaffected. They are women, the soldiers, the bishops, the metal workers, the trade unionists. They are the people who have suffered and who have grown from their suffering.
Oliver Stone spent time with each of the leaders mentioned above and his interviews with them, and with Raoul Castro of Cuba, are the superficial focal point of his fascinating documentary. History, however, is the real star of the show. It is a history that began with the dream of a united Latin America speaking with one voice in favor of its people and against the Europeans and their descendants.
The President of the United States, Barack Obama, came to that office at a most monumental time in world history. With leftist and populist movements celebrating their victories throughout South America, with nations paying off their debts to the International Monetary Fund and thereby freeing themselves to act in accordance with the best interests of the people of their countries rather than in the interests of financiers, and with a massively unpopular outgoing series of imperialist foreign policies from a previous administration, the proper alignment of circumstances appeared to be set in place.
For a long time I wondered why the ruling class in the United States--by which I mean the media, the banks, the oil companies--were so united in their opposition to Obama. After all, wasn't he simply a dark-skinned member of their own old boys club? Perhaps he was. But the attacks against Obama in this country stem from his refusal to endorse centuries of colonial efforts against the people of Latin America. Chavez himself told Stone that he hopes Obama will be another [Franklin] Roosevelt. He meant that statement in terms of U.S. domestic policy, but the reality is that Obama's policies regarding Latin America are closer to those of FDR than any president since World War II. Venezuela has oil, a lot of it. And when the oil companies in that country became nationalized, just as the sugar cane fields did in Cuba decades ago, that fact is upsetting to those who profit from the exploitation of natural resources. Nationalization is the opposite of privatization. And it is the latter practice that diverts wealth into the hands of a few, leaving billions of empty stomachs grumbling for crumbs. If that sounds hyperbolic, I apologize. You see, this film has that kind of an effect on me, in large part because, watching South of the Border, one is again reminded of the corruption of most of the global media empires. CNN does not have your best interests at heart. Certainly Fox does not. The less regressive (as opposed to the word of the moment "progressive") Current TV and MSNBC occasionally do but that's only because of the renegade work of the teams of Maddow and (formerly) Olbermann. And so this film demands that we think about the issues it raises. Stone himself argues in favor of the possibility of a "benign capitalism," rather than the overtly predatory version currently in place. Naturally, the movie does not explore what he thinks the components of such a system would be. That's because, in the final analysis, some type of leftward socialism is coming and he knows it. Obama is not a socialist. However, even that Harvard graduate is smart enough to recognize the wisdom of an old man, long dead, who said, "When a man senses the winds of change blowing, if he is wise he builds a windmill and not a wind block."
COMANDANTE
It may not have been on a par with Chelsea's wedding or Meghan McCain turning into a journalist, but Oliver Stone's visits to Cuba between February 2002 and May 2003 were certainly noteworthy as they were essential to two films put together by the director: South of the Border and Looking For Fidel, the latter not being the rather shabby 2006 Leonardo Corbucci mess, but rather the 2004 production shared between HBO and France 2. According to a report in the Miami New Times, Stone was fined by the Office of Foreign Asset Control, a division within the U.S. Department of Treasury, for violation of the U.S.-Cuban Embargo. The director's production company, Ixtlan, agreed to a settlement of $6,322.20 for violating the rules that then forbade Americans traveling to Cuba, a nation ninety miles off the coast of Key West, Florida. The embargo does permit journalists to travel to Cuba; however, Oliver made the mistake of admitting that in his role in Cuba he did not consider himself so much a journalist as a filmmaker.
That's too bad because Stone proves himself to be precisely the kind of journalist we in America have had in short supply for many years now. Anyone expecting a puff-piece directed at the secret behest of Fidel Castro will be very much surprised. For instance, in the film's most dramatic scene, Castro himself shares a room with eight men charged with trying to hijack a plane to Miami. Castro encourages the men to speak freely and to be mindful that in that room they are not on trial. In response, all eight men insist that their motivation for their crime was economic rather than political. I have tried and failed to think of a parallel in the history of the United States where people accused of a crime "against the state" had the opportunity to confront the national leader, even for the purposes of "show." It might be interesting to have situated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a small room crammed with journalists from across the globe along with George W. Bush so that we could hear the US commander say, "Go on, say whatever you want" and Mohammed saying something like "Look, this was nothing personal, you understand." The exchange is fascinating as we watch Fidel thinking about every word the men speak, insisting that their fate is in the hands of the courts. Stone asks the men what they believe would be a fair sentence for their crimes and several of them declare thirty years imprisonment would fit the crime. In the end, three of them received that exact sentence, while the other five received life terms. Stone suggests that five years with parole would be suitable, but Castro interjects that Cuba has no such system of justice.
One of the things anyone who watches this hour-long film will come away with is the sheer presence of the man in the title role. Castro refers to himself at one point as the "spiritual leader" of his country and watching him with the people on the streets, you get the sense that this is a fair self-assessment. Back in my college days I watched some pro-Pol Pot academic visitor show a film he had made to our school and the film showed all sorts of smiling children gazing into the camera and the visitor then stopped the film and announced that this was proof that rumors of mass exterminations were just so much imperialist propaganda. Well, it was no such thing, as one of our own professors angrily stood and pointed out. But I don't think this interview with Castro was necessarily a Stalinist-style staged performance. These folks in the crowd with Fidel weren't scripted. They appeared genuinely enthused with the opportunities the Cuban government has afforded them, not the least of which being a free education all the way through doctorate-level work, free healthcare for all Cubans, an infant birth survival rate that is better than the one in the United States, full employment, etc. Most of these people are too young to have the Batista regime to use as a contrast, but they are not idiots, either. They are able, as I suspect most people living anywhere are able, to discern the crap from the creole. And they know their own history, a history that is inseparable from that of the USA.
For anyone looking for a film that sets Castro within his proper historical context, thereby permitting some of his more newsworthy actions to make any kind of sense, the movie to see is Comandante, which also happens to be directed by Mr. Stone. Of course, HBO, which originally commissioned the 2003 documentary, decided they didn't like what they took to be the pro-Castro tone of the film and chose not to air it. However, if your Spanish is decent you can still find it easily on YouTube and I would recommend watching it even if you don't speak a word of the language if for no other reason than the the archival work Stone assembled is brilliant in setting up the reality that way back in early 1959 the United States actually endorsed the Cuban revolution led by Mr. Castro. It bears recalling as well that many of the positions of the Cuban government have been what they viewed as reasonable responses to U.S. actions, such as the 734 known attempts on the life of the Cuban leader, the attempted coup at the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the ongoing Cuban Embargo which forced Castro's government to trade with countries sometimes unfriendly toward the USA, the CIA-sponsored terrorist activities against Cuba carried out by Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada and others, the conspiracy at Watergate, the Iran-Contra ordeal, the stolen U.S. election of 2000: all of these have direct ties to the so-called Cuban dissident movement, much of which has been run through the Dallas-New Orleans-Miami corridor and which remains in full force to this day.
In the famous words of Jim Garrison, "Some people think I'm crazy." Well, there are ways to determine if I am making up all these connections. You can read a Cuban history book. You can read books on the history of Cuban-American relations throughout the twentieth century. You can follow the trail of money from U.S. front organizations into the hands of trained mercenaries who in turn train a small section of disaffected Cubans to act as traitors. Or you can read the following, quoted verbatim, from the National Security Archive, circa 2002. "In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS. This document, titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” was provided by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals--part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose--included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake 'Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,' including 'sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),' faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a 'Remember the Maine' incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods 'may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.'"
Ultimately people everywhere are free to believe whatever they want, even in a democracy, even in an authoritarian system, even somewhere in between. "Nobody's perfect," quips Oliver Stone at the end of an interview conducted by Slate.com upon the release of Looking For Fidel. True, that. But, at least in Comandante, we get a serious, even somewhat academic look at one of the most fascinating and certainly one of the key human beings of our life time. As I say, it may not be on a par with the release of the latest Janet Evanovich novel or the merger between Nabisco and Typhoid, but it'll do in a pinch.
That's too bad because Stone proves himself to be precisely the kind of journalist we in America have had in short supply for many years now. Anyone expecting a puff-piece directed at the secret behest of Fidel Castro will be very much surprised. For instance, in the film's most dramatic scene, Castro himself shares a room with eight men charged with trying to hijack a plane to Miami. Castro encourages the men to speak freely and to be mindful that in that room they are not on trial. In response, all eight men insist that their motivation for their crime was economic rather than political. I have tried and failed to think of a parallel in the history of the United States where people accused of a crime "against the state" had the opportunity to confront the national leader, even for the purposes of "show." It might be interesting to have situated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a small room crammed with journalists from across the globe along with George W. Bush so that we could hear the US commander say, "Go on, say whatever you want" and Mohammed saying something like "Look, this was nothing personal, you understand." The exchange is fascinating as we watch Fidel thinking about every word the men speak, insisting that their fate is in the hands of the courts. Stone asks the men what they believe would be a fair sentence for their crimes and several of them declare thirty years imprisonment would fit the crime. In the end, three of them received that exact sentence, while the other five received life terms. Stone suggests that five years with parole would be suitable, but Castro interjects that Cuba has no such system of justice.
One of the things anyone who watches this hour-long film will come away with is the sheer presence of the man in the title role. Castro refers to himself at one point as the "spiritual leader" of his country and watching him with the people on the streets, you get the sense that this is a fair self-assessment. Back in my college days I watched some pro-Pol Pot academic visitor show a film he had made to our school and the film showed all sorts of smiling children gazing into the camera and the visitor then stopped the film and announced that this was proof that rumors of mass exterminations were just so much imperialist propaganda. Well, it was no such thing, as one of our own professors angrily stood and pointed out. But I don't think this interview with Castro was necessarily a Stalinist-style staged performance. These folks in the crowd with Fidel weren't scripted. They appeared genuinely enthused with the opportunities the Cuban government has afforded them, not the least of which being a free education all the way through doctorate-level work, free healthcare for all Cubans, an infant birth survival rate that is better than the one in the United States, full employment, etc. Most of these people are too young to have the Batista regime to use as a contrast, but they are not idiots, either. They are able, as I suspect most people living anywhere are able, to discern the crap from the creole. And they know their own history, a history that is inseparable from that of the USA.
For anyone looking for a film that sets Castro within his proper historical context, thereby permitting some of his more newsworthy actions to make any kind of sense, the movie to see is Comandante, which also happens to be directed by Mr. Stone. Of course, HBO, which originally commissioned the 2003 documentary, decided they didn't like what they took to be the pro-Castro tone of the film and chose not to air it. However, if your Spanish is decent you can still find it easily on YouTube and I would recommend watching it even if you don't speak a word of the language if for no other reason than the the archival work Stone assembled is brilliant in setting up the reality that way back in early 1959 the United States actually endorsed the Cuban revolution led by Mr. Castro. It bears recalling as well that many of the positions of the Cuban government have been what they viewed as reasonable responses to U.S. actions, such as the 734 known attempts on the life of the Cuban leader, the attempted coup at the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the ongoing Cuban Embargo which forced Castro's government to trade with countries sometimes unfriendly toward the USA, the CIA-sponsored terrorist activities against Cuba carried out by Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada and others, the conspiracy at Watergate, the Iran-Contra ordeal, the stolen U.S. election of 2000: all of these have direct ties to the so-called Cuban dissident movement, much of which has been run through the Dallas-New Orleans-Miami corridor and which remains in full force to this day.
In the famous words of Jim Garrison, "Some people think I'm crazy." Well, there are ways to determine if I am making up all these connections. You can read a Cuban history book. You can read books on the history of Cuban-American relations throughout the twentieth century. You can follow the trail of money from U.S. front organizations into the hands of trained mercenaries who in turn train a small section of disaffected Cubans to act as traitors. Or you can read the following, quoted verbatim, from the National Security Archive, circa 2002. "In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS. This document, titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” was provided by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals--part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose--included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake 'Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,' including 'sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),' faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a 'Remember the Maine' incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods 'may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.'"
Ultimately people everywhere are free to believe whatever they want, even in a democracy, even in an authoritarian system, even somewhere in between. "Nobody's perfect," quips Oliver Stone at the end of an interview conducted by Slate.com upon the release of Looking For Fidel. True, that. But, at least in Comandante, we get a serious, even somewhat academic look at one of the most fascinating and certainly one of the key human beings of our life time. As I say, it may not be on a par with the release of the latest Janet Evanovich novel or the merger between Nabisco and Typhoid, but it'll do in a pinch.
