Well before the advent of the Hollywood
pseudo documentary, Karl Marx suggested that all great events
and personalities in world history happen twice: "the first
time as tragedy, the second as farce." Oliver Stone's film
"JFK" repesents the second coming of Jim Garrison.
In 1969, when Jim Garrison's Conspiracy-To-Kill-Kennedy
trial collapsed, his entire case that the accused, Clay
Shaw, had participated in an assassination plot turned out
to be based on nothing more than the hypnotized- induced
story of a single witness. This witness, Perry Raymond Russo,
had testified that he had had no conscious memory of his
own conspiracy story before he had been drugged, hypnotized,
and fed hypothetical circumstances about the plot he was
supposed to have witnessed by the district attorney. To
the dismay of his supporters-- and three of his Garrison's
staff resigned-- this was the essence of Garrison's show
trial: a witness who acknowledged he could not, after this
bizarre treatment, separate fantasy from reality. After
that, Garrison's meretricious prosecution of it was considered
by the press to be, as the New York Times noted in an editorial,
"one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of
American jurisprudence." In this debacle, Garrison himself
was exposed as a man who had recklessly disregarded the
truth when it suited his purposes.
Then, in 1991, a generation later, Garrison
re-emerges phoenix-like from the debris as the truth-seeking
prosecutor (played by Kevin Costner) in the film "JFK"--
and who brilliantly solves the mystery of the Kennedy Assassination.
In this version, there is no hypnosis: the reborn Garrison
resourcefully uncovers cogent evidence that Clay Shaw planned
the Dallas ambush of President Kennedy in New Orleans with
two confederates: David William Ferrie (played by Joe Persci),
a homosexual soldier of fortune and Lee Harvey Oswald (played
by Gary Oldman). He establishes that this trio, who also
participate together in orgies, all worked for the CIA,
and were recruited into a conspiracy to seize power in Washington.
Filmed in a grainy semi-documentary
style, with newsreels as well as amateur footage incorporated
into it, "JFK" purports to reveal the actual truth about
the Kennedy Assassination. From the moment it was released,
its director Oliver Stone has so passionately defended its
factual accuracy that he became, for all practical purposes,
the new Garrison. What could be more appropriate in the
age of media than a crusading film-maker replacing a crusading
District Attorney as the symbol of the truth-finder in society?
In this capacity, Oliver Stone-Garrison played out his case
on television news programs, talk shows, magazines and the
op- ed pages of news papers. He held his own press conferences,
with his attractive researcher at his side, met with Congressional
leaders, and he, as the original Garrison had done a quarter
of a century before, used this public platform to focus
attention on the possibility that the government was hiding
the truth about the Kennedy Assassination. In exploiting
this torment of secrecy, Stone proved far more successful
than his predecessor in rousing interest in releasing the
classified files pertaining to the assassination.
But where Jim Garrison failed in building
a plausible conspiracy case against Clay Shaw, how did Oliver
Stone succeed? The answer is that whereas the original Garrison
only attempted to coax, intimidate and hypnotize unable
witnesses into providing him with incriminating evidence,
the new Garrison, Oliver Stone, fabricated for his film
the crucial evidence and witnesses that were missing in
real life-- even when this license required deliberately
falsifying reality and depicting events that never happened.
Consider, for example, the way he fabricated Ferrie's dramatic
confession to Garrison in a hotel room only hours before
he died.
In reality, as well as in Jim Garrison's
account of the case, David Ferrie steadfastly maintaining
his innocence, insisting he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald,
he was not in the CIA, and that he had no knowledge of any
plot to kill Kennedy. The last known person to speak to
Ferrie was George Lardner, Jr. of the Washington Post, who
Ferrie had met with from midnight to 4 a.m. of February
22, 1967. During this interview, Ferrie described Garrison
(who he hasn't seen for weeks) as "a joke". Several hours
later, Ferrie died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
In "JFK", Oliver Stone invents, and
falsifies, his own version of Ferrie's last night. Instead
of being calmly interviewed by a reporter in his home, "JFK"
shows a panicked Ferrie being doggedly interrogated by Jim
Garrison in a hotel suite until he finally break down and
confesses. Ferrie names his CIA controller an, in rapid-fire
succession, Ferrie admits in the film everything he denied
in real life. He acknowledges that he taught Oswald " everything".
He then explains that no only does he know Clay Shaw but
he is being blackmailed by him and controlled by him. He
also admits that he works for the CIA-- along with Oswald,
Shaw and "the Cubans", who were the "shooters" in Dallas.
He displays intimate knowledge of the plot by explaining
that the "shooters" were recruited without told whose orders
they were carrying out. He tells a cool Garrison that the
plot is "too big" to be investigated, implying that powerful
figures are behind it, and that, because they know Ferrie
is now talking, they have issued a "death warrant" for him.
After Ferrie leaves Garrison and returns
to his apartment, he is shown being chased, held down, and
murdered by a bald-headed man who forces pills down his
throat. The murderer, who is shown in other fictional scenes
as an associate of Shaw, Oswald, and the Anti-Castro Cuban
shooters. When Garrison arrives at the murder scene and
finds the empty bottle of pills, he concludes Ferrie was
murdered which gives Ferrie's earlier revelations to Garrison
the force of a death-bed confession. (In reality, the coroner
ruled that Ferrie had died from "natural causes"--a verdict
that Garrison, as the empowered authority, did not contest).
Oliver Stone's transformations in this
scene involves more than some trivial cinematic contrivances.
They provide the linkage for the conspiracy. Ferrie's confession
connects the team of anonymous Cuban "shooters" in Dallas
with Clay Shaw, David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald in New
Orleans and, at a higher level, the CIA "untouchables".
Whereas in actuality Ferrie denied he was in the CIA, ever
knew Oswald, or knew anything about a plot to kill JFK,
in the film, Stone has Ferrie confess he was in the CIA,
knew and trained Oswald and knew key details of the plot
to shoot JFK. These fabricated admissions changes the entire
story-- just as it would change the story about the execution
of Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg if film fabricated a fictional
scene showing the Rosen bergs confessing to J. Edgar Hoover
that they were part a Communist conspiracy to steal atomic
secrets.
And Ferrie's false confessions is not
an isolated bit of license. Throughout JFK, in dozens of
scenes, Oliver Stone substitutes fiction for fact when it
advances his case. He even blatantly contradicts the two
books he represents as being the basis for "JFK"-- Jim Garrison,
" On The Trail of the Assassins" (Warners Books, 1988) and
James Marrs, Cross Fire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (Carroll
and Graf, 1990).. He makes especially effective use of this
substitution technique when it comes to witnesses. Here,
like all fictionalizers, he has an advantage over fact finders:
he can artfully fashion his replacement witnesses to meet
the audience's criteria for what is credible. His substitution
of the fictive "Willie O'Keefe" to replace Garrison's flawed
witness, Perry Raymond Russo, is a case in point.
Russo, it will be recalled, was Garrison's
sole witness to the alleged plot that was planned in Ferrie's
apartment. But in actuality his credibility suffered from
three problems.
First, there was the memory lapse. Russo
did not tell his incriminating story until four years after
the assassination and then only after he had been rendered
semiconscious by sodium pentathol and instructed by a hypnotist
to imagine he is watching an important discussion "about
assassinating someone."
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