The truth as a lie

JFK, directed by Oliver Stone, Capitol Cineplex, Cork, 7pm.  Late show Friday and Saturday night 11pm.

No film in recent years has been hyped as massively as Oliver Stone’s JFK.  It seems to have inspired articles in every magazine and newspaper in the world.  The film itself is the centre of the phenomenon, forty million dollars’ worth of Oliver Stone, but obvious interest goes beyond the production to take in the themes of Kennedy’s charisma, the mystery still surrounding his death and their place in popular culture.

Fintan O’Toole promises a sub-Baudrillard interpretation of the assassination as the defining moment of transition from the modern to the post-modern.  This theme is by now familiar: nothing is real, everything is image, the end of progress is signalled by the eternal recurrence of the film of Kennedy’s death on 22 November 1963.

This is one view, Kennedy as contemptible fraud, his death as unfathomable mystery.  Oliver Stone states the opposite opinion with greater personal conviction: the President was killed by the military-industrial complex because he planned to withdraw American troops from Vietnam.

Stone himself has been subjected to intense media analysis because of the controversial message of the film.  He tends to paint with a broad brush on a big canvas.  This was evident from Platoon on.  That film, of course, dealt with his experience fighting in Vietnam and was acclaimed as the most realistic depiction of that war in the era of Stallone’s Rambo.

Now we move to realism as myth.  As so often the moment Stone sees as a historic break for the country is matched by a personal trauma.  In 1962, when he was sixteen, Oliver Stone’s parents divorced.  Whatever sense of lost personal security that must have involved was soon compounded by his war service.

Both the interpretation of Kennedy’s Vietnam policy and the heroic role Stone assigns to the real-life character of the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison have opened the film to the charge of falsifying history.  Kennedy did not plan to abandon South Vietnam at the time of his death, this would have been politically unthinkable in the climate of 1963, he would not have wanted to and he would not have been able to.  The plan to withdraw US military advisers by the end of 1965 was based on the assumption that by then the Communists would have been defeated.

However, the public and private record shows that Kennedy was looking for a way out of the Cold War, that he was less committed to South Vietnam than his successor Lyndon Johnson, and above all that he had no intention of leading the US into a major war in Asia.  The enigma remains, caused by the assassination itself: Kennedy led the US into the Vietnam quagmire but he was also the man who might have led America out had he lived.

Norman Mailer well caught the central ambiguity of Kennedy’s political persona in his writings at the time.  In 1960 his long article ‘Superman Comes to the Supermarket’ helped swing the election by presenting John Kennedy as an “existential hero”.  After the Bay of Pigs invasion the following year he tried to take his favour away with another article in which he described the President as “an undeserving young stud” with “a mind like a newspaper yearbook”.

Years later Mailer still saw Kennedy as the man who opened “the first hairline crack in the totalitarianism of the American Fifties”.  The shopping-list of legislative achievements was not important.  Was it this contradiction between Kennedy the super-conformist and the secret rebel that got him killed?

Kevin Costner is called on to carry the film as Garrison.  He is on-screen almost all the way through.  The assassination keeps recurring as flashback and montage of newsreel and reconstructed scenes.  The convoluted politics of the early Sixties, from civil rights to Cuba, are all touched on using the same device.

Costner proves equal to the task.  His Southern accent holds.  The three hours pass briskly, helped along by a literate script and a fine cast.  Sissy Spacek appears as Garrison’s neglected wife Liz, most critics seem to have found her annoying and irrelevant, I thought I detected a certain knowing irony in her performance as Sixties’ blonde, clinging rather than “supportive”.

The villains of the piece, as presented by Stone, are to be found in US military intelligence.  Three teams of gunmen lay in wait in Dealey Plaza, Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed, as he claimed, set up as “a patsy”, but he was involved with right-wing anti-Castro Cuban paramilitaries in Louisiana during the summer of 1963.

Two bizarre minor characters in the contemporary cosmos, David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, are brought vividly to life on the screen.  Both were homosexuals, involved, rather improbably, in the anti-Castro underground.  Ferrie, a manic figure with painted eyebrows and ginger wig, was taken into custody by Garrison after the assassination, turned over by him to the FBI who released him.  He later died in circumstances considered mysterious.

Clay Shaw alias Bertrand, a courtly New Orleans businessman, was the focus of Garrison’s 1966-69 investigation; he was brought to trial amid enormous publicity but acquitted.

Garrison, as has been repeatedly pointed out, never made the long and impassioned closing speech to the court Costner delivers at the film’s conclusion, wildly quoting everyone from Shakespeare to Hitler.  How far can this be excused as dramatic licence, Garrison standing in as a symbol for all the conspiracy-hunters, before it must be deplored as misrepresentation?

Stone, for example, presents the removal of Kennedy’s body from Dallas as an integral part of a “coup d’etat”.  In fact, anyone familiar with William Manchester’s book The Death of a President will be aware that the body was removed from Texas aboard Airforce One that afternoon at the behest of White House Chief-of-Staff Kenny O’Donnell and Jacqueline Kennedy.

There is a very eerie scene in which what must be a rubber dummy of the assassinated President’s body is shown during the subsequent crowded autopsy in Washington.

The famous ‘Zapruder film’ appears only towards the close of the movie.  It had at the time of the Shaw trial never been shown on television and had to be subpoenaed from Time-Life.

In a couple of hundred frames of colour home-movie footage the images of Kennedy’s death are captured.  As Stone interprets the film it shows no less than six shots were fired, JFK hit three times, John Connally once and a bystander wounded by flying fragments.  The fatal shot which blew President Kennedy’s head apart fired from the ‘grassy knoll’ area in front of him and to the right.

This would of course invalidate the official Warren Commission finding that the assassination was the work of a lone gunman - Oswald - firing a bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from the Texas School Book Depository above and behind the President’s car.  The flaw in this “turkey shoot” theory is that it contradicts the acoustic evidence of a police radio tape purportedly proving four shots were fired: three from the Book Depository, one - which missed - from the grassy knoll.  The audio tape was the evidence on which the House Assassinations Committee based their 1979 finding that President Kennedy had been the victim of a conspiracy.

I have two memories of November 1963 myself.  One day that month mother took me to see the primary school where I would be a pupil from the following January.  I remember the news of President Kennedy’s assassination and the killing of Oswald two days later.  At the time I am afraid I rather hoped Ruby would subsequently be shot too.

I don’t remember if Kennedy was shot the day we visited the school.  It would have been a sinister augury for the beginning of my education, the end of which, 28 years later, is not yet.

Finally one must have misgivings about the endless repetition of this obscene act of violence.  A death on film, recycled for its curiosity value.

‘THE PAST IS PROLOGUE’ Stone concludes grandly before dedicating the film ‘TO THE YOUNG’.  There has been a promise that the Pentagon files on Oswald’s strange career in the US Marines and then as a defector in the Soviet Union will be opened.  If truth emerges from JFK Stone’s bold enterprise will be justified.

3 March 1992