America's Secret History

As this is written, the media controversy surrounding Oliver Stone's film JFK is reaching a fever pitch. Both major newsmags, The Washington Post, ABC's PrimeTime Live, and Dan Rather himself have all dumped their heaviest artillery fire upon Stone's political mystery tale about the killing of President John F. Kennedy. As they have been since 1963, the corporate media are now unanimous in their unquestioning endorsement of the official story of Kennedy's death--lone nut, magic bullet, and all.

Stone, the wise ones say, is trafficking in half-truths and distortions. They say he's defaming the character of people--Clay Shaw and Lyndon Johnson, for starters--who are not alive to defend themselves. He's mixing up fictional inventions and known facts toward sinister, if not treasonous, ends.

Worst of all, Stone's critics say, he is "rewriting history." But, as any honest scholar or researcher would tell you, sometimes history needs to be rewritten. Sometimes official history is just a cover story, the alibi of criminals in power. For decades the majority of the American people have suspected that the official story of Kennedy's death was just that.

It is at least amusing that a media establishment which, for most of the 1980s, unquestioningly transmitted the fantasy-laden vision of a Hollywood president, is now trying to turn a filmmaker's every dramatic condensation or telescoping of characters into a deliberate deception. But the Big Boys are confused, or hopelessly media illiterate.

To spell it out: Oliver Stone was making a movie. He's an artist. Michael Deaver, the image-monger of the Reagan White House, was a liar.

There is a difference. An artist, working in the medium of historical narrative, uses facts the way a sculptor uses clay, as the raw material to fashion a personal vision of the events in question. The clay of Stone's movie is all either verifiably factual or arguably so. The picture he fashions from that clay is a personal vision. It is upon that ground which Stone, or his work, should be engaged.

UNFORTUNATELY in both his choice of material and the way he presents it, Stone has created some openings for his critics. Few assassination experts would choose New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison as the personification of their case. Garrison seems to have found a peripheral piece of the puzzle among the New Orleans circle of anti-Castro plotters. And he was brave, and ambitious, enough to pull at that corner of the conspiratorial cloth with all his might.

But Garrison was also a flawed man who conducted a flawed investigation. Stone makes nods toward Garrison's flaws in the movie. There are strong hints of a destructive messiah complex around the edges of Kevin Costner's version of Garrison.

But ultimately, as savvy film critics have pointed out, Stone's movie is not a Jim Garrison bio-pic. It is instead a compellingly cinematic and grandly conceived political argument about post-World War II American history. Stone's thesis is that by 1960 the secret government that was created to fight the Cold War had grown more powerful than the democratic government it supposedly served. Hence the strange warning against the military-industrial complex in President Eisenhower's farewell address.

By 1963, John Kennedy wanted to take advantage of Khrushchev's proto-Gorbachevian opening to end the Cold War and rein in the secret government. In this reading of history, the assassination was a coup d'etat in which the invisible government definitively established its primacy over the visible one.

This is the real heart of Stone's movie. I, for one, am only half-convinced by it. As the House Assassinations Committee of the mid-1970s concluded, honest reappraisal of the physical evidence proves that Oswald could not have acted alone.

That means there was a conspiracy of some kind. Oswald's strange history points toward links with U.S. secret intelligence agencies, which strongly suggests that the plot to execute the president either emerged from, or had the complicity of, powerful elements of the intelligence underworld.

In my layperson's reading this much seems self-evident. The rest of Stone's argument, about the policy motives and institutional reach of the conspiracy, is just that, an argument--albeit a well-made one. And his critics can't refute it by simply trotting out their hired experts one more time. Instead they must also account for 30 bloody, shameful, and secretive years of American history.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.