Washington Decoded

What Oswald Wrought: Lament of a Generation

Oswald’s Ghost
Directed and Written by Robert Stone
Produced by Robert Stone/AMERICAN EXPERIENCE/WGBH
    in Association with the BBC
Documentary. 90 Minutes. 2007

American Assassin: Oswald Behind the Iron Curtain
Directed and Written by Robert Bayne
Produced by InSight Films/Minsk Channel 8
Documentary. 73 Minutes. 2006

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By Max Holland

   

The 2007-08 season of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE opens with Oswald’s Ghost, a new documentary by filmmaker Robert Stone. It purports to chronicle “America’s forty-year obsession with the pivotal event of a generation,” the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963.

 Oswald’s Ghost is not another “whodunit” film about the assassination. Rather, it is billed as close to a “definitive account” of what the assassination did to America. “This is a film,” in the words of writer/producer/director Robert Stone, “about how we absorbed and responded to the trauma and shock of being inexplicably—and repeatedly—robbed of our sense  of idealism, optimism, and security.” Put more bluntly perhaps, Oswald’s Ghost is the baby  boomers’ penultimate take on the defining mystery (supposedly) of their lives.

    There is a level on which Oswald’s Ghost succeeds. Through the recollections of authors  such as the late Norman Mailer, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, and others, the documentary  vividly recalls to mind the nation’s raw emotions. Mailer evokes the immediate aftermath,  when he observes that “The real shock was philosophical, as if God had removed his sanction from America.” Political activists, ranging from Tom Hayden to Todd Gitlin to Gary Hart  (which, come to think of it, is not a very broad range) summon the effect of the assassination and its aftermath on the baby boom generation in particular.

    After Oswald’s death in police custody, “The impression [was that] somebody organized a  conspiracy to wipe out Oswald,” observes Hayden, who would soon become a leader of the  so-called “New Left.”And naturally, there is the obligatory bow to Camelot. “The image of politicians up to that time was a kind of stereotypical back-room, arm-twisting, deal-making character,” notes Gary Hart, with more than a hint of emotion. And then, “along came this  very attractive, very articulate, 44-year-old . . . war hero . . . intelligent . . . read books . . . so he almost totally [and] single-handedly transformed the image of a politician.” So long as Kennedy was alive, Hayden chimes in, “We thought that we could change the world. This is the key thing that I think ended, for me certainly, with the murder of Kennedy.”

    Once disbelief in the official story began to outpoll belief, roughly two years after the 1964 release of the Warren Report, Mailer notes that the official conspiratorial theory  became that “Kennedy was killed ’cause he was getting ready to pull out of Vietnam, and that  couldn’t be. . . . And like all of those theories it had [a] certain plausibility and a depressing lack of proof.” The 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F.  Kennedy, of course, were the final blow. The latter’s quest for the presidency embodied the  hope that Camelot might yet be restored, and that the American people would be redeemed for  their sin of insufficiently appreciating JFK while he was alive. As Tom Hayden, puts it,

The impression [now] is that we’re facing power structures or conspiratorial cliques that apparently will stop at nothing. This became incorporated into a new understanding about how power works in America. . . . We’re not as democratic as we were taught. The model we’re operating on needs to incorporate random events, assassinations, stolen elections. We are not different from other countries.

    That realization, in turn, led to the violent clash at the Democratic convention in Chicago, or as Todd Gitlin characterizes it, “the colossal confrontation between the forces of light and forces of darkness” that the Democrats have been trying to overcome ever since.

    While Robert Stone takes the narrative all the way up to and past the 1991 blockbuster JFK by Oliver Stone (apparently no relation), the above is sufficient to convey the gist of what Robert Stone is trying to accomplish in Oswald’s Ghost. His aim is to present a meta-narrative about the event that cast a pall for decades over the American psyche and politics, and strains the fundamental bond of trust between the American people and their government to this day.

If the insights Stone presents sound familiar, though, it’s because they are. For a major, amply-funded, and polished documentary four years in the making, it’s oddly devoid of anything we haven’t heard before and long ago. And that points to the problem underlying Stone’s approach.The documentary’s unarticulated premise is that one does not actually need to stake out a position about what exactly happened on November 22 (apart from agreeing that Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas) to present a history of what this watershed event did to America afterwards. One can believe the Warren Commission got it essentially right, or one can believe the panel was plainly incompetent. One can believe the commission was uninterested in getting at the truth, and chiefly an exercise in political pacification; or one can believe the commission was congenitally corrupt, and a heinous accessory after the fact. Ostensibly, it doesn’t matter what one believes because the history of the aftermath remains the same.

    Such a notion is fashionable nonsense. Stone’s premise is not a premise at all, but a contemporary conceit. The impact of the assassination cannot be discerned, much less presented, if one cannot tell the difference between the truth-seekers and the poseurs, the truth-tellers and the charlatans, or worse, if one knows the difference but shies away from conveying that distinction. The story of the aftermath depends wholeheartedly on a correct reading of the assassination, which happened only one way, after all, regardless of the number of possible scenarios.

    Robert Stone would surely argue otherwise, and the most charitable interpretation of Oswald’s Ghost is that Stone thinks viewers will be able to figure out, perhaps by osmosis, that conspiracy-mongering is a dead and politically-enervating end. But what makes Stone’s artifice indefensible, in the end, is the film’s technique. The documentary is done in a pointillist style. Archival footage is interspersed with the recollections, opinions, and musings of 11 talking heads, most of whom had direct contact with the assassination and/or its aftermath.[1] The bulk of the statements uttered are accurate, but a disturbing number are misrepresentations, half-truths, and outright falsehoods. One waits in vain for a narrator to guide one’s way through this thicket, but a voice of omniscient reason never is heard. The net effect is to put prevaricators and dissemblers on the same plane as the truth-tellers, and accord the former a respectability and authority they do not deserve.

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Rendezvous with Death:
    Why John F. Kennedy Had to Die
Directed by Wilfried Huismann
Written by Wilfried Huismann & Gus Russo
Produced by WDR/NHK/SWR/Radio Bremen
Documentary. 90 Minutes. 2006

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By Ron Radosh

    Everyone loves conspiracy theories, and Europe is no different. First they had the best-selling French book whose author claimed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were covert actions of American intelligence; next there was the Arab world’s claim that it was an operation by Israeli intelligence. Now we have a new one--in the form of a much-hyped German television documentary, Rendezvous with Death, directed by Wilfried Huismann with the help of an American JFK assassination buff named Gus Russo. The film first aired in Germany in January and is now being readied for American distribution.

    Ulrich Deppendorf, the director of German television’s public  broadcasting network, ARD--the equivalent of PBS here--claims the documentary proves that “Lee Harvey Oswald was the final pawn in a murderous feud between Fidel Castro and the Kennedy brothers.” This writer would love nothing more than to reveal that the detestable Fidel Castro, one of the hemisphere’s few remaining communist dictators and tyrants, had a hand in President Kennedy’s murder, using Oswald as a secret top agent of Cuba’s G-2, its intelligence arm. Unfortunately, this tendentious and conspiratorial film--blending favored conspiracy theories of both the far left and far right--falls far short of the task.

    The 90-minute film offers the following line of argument. Oswald, then a 24-year-old Castro supporter, got his orders in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, where G-2 gave him the job of assassinating the American president. The job was Mr. Castro’s retaliation for the CIA’s comic and failed attempts to have Mr. Castro killed--from exploding cigars to poison in his food. Those who have not studied the hundreds of assassination books, or had a chance to read Gerald Posner’s definitive conspiracy-debunking Case Closed, might find the film compelling on first viewing.

    Over dramatic music, Mr. Huismann presents - for the “first time” of course - tapped phone calls from the Cuban Embassy in Mexico; references to secret KGB documents about Oswald; and alleged former agents from G-2, now in exile in Spain and Mexico. Each says he always knew Oswald was their former agency’s pawn. Mr. Huismann also interviews Larry Keenan, a former FBI agent who was sent to investigate in Mexico after Kennedy’s death - and quickly called back - as well as a former CIA officer named Sam Halpern, who was involved in the plots to eliminate Mr. Castro in the 1960s. But Mr. Halpern offers nothing to substantiate the film’s thesis, merely reiterating familiar stories about the attempts to assassinate Mr. Castro.

    Compelling? Hardly. First, the witnesses are all speaking second-hand; not one of them is said to have been involved in running Oswald. Take one charge made by Mr. Huismann. An unidentified but alleged FSB officer, presented in silhouette, reads from what he says is a secret telegram dated July 18, 1962, sent by the KGB (the FSB’s predecessor agency) to the Cubans. The gist of the message allegedly supports former G-2 agent Antulio Ramirez’s claim that the KGB contacted him to let him know that Oswald had gone back to the United States, and was therefore ready for some unspecified mission. We are offered no proof that such a telegram exists save for Mr. Huismann’s source’s claim. Likewise, we are told that Oswald’s attempt to kill right-wing Major General Edwin Walker in April 1963--which he fumbled--was a test run by G-2 to see whether he was capable of assassination. Again, not one iota of hard evidence is offered; it’s just  asserted that the Cubans were involved.

    The main evidence offered by Mr. Huismann and writer Gus Russo--their would-be smoking gun--is a document written on White House stationery. It says on the morning of November 22, the day JFK was killed, Fabian Escalante, the head of Cuba’s counterintelligence service and a top adviser to Mr. Castro, took off in a small passenger plane to Dallas from Mexico to personally supervise the impending assassination. After Kennedy was dead, Escalante purportedly flew back to Mexico and switched to another plane for his return to Cuba.

    Viewers are shown dramatic footage of a small plane, which we are told is “Escalante’s plane” and proves nothing. (The claim is the equivalent of someone who says he has proof that then-CIA chief of counter-intelligence James Angleton had flown into Havana in a small plane to supervise the various attempts to assassinate Mr. Castro.) We are never told how Escalante brazenly managed to fly into Dallas the day of the president’s appearance undetected by radar, immigration, or customs, and then direct a covert operation. Mr. Huismann says he got the handwritten memo, which is shown on screen, from a former JFK and LBJ aide, Martin Underwood, who asked that it not be made public until his own death.

    Why would Underwood have waited decades to release this document, when for years he was a key proponent of JFK conspiracy theories? The filmmakers do not disclose that Underwood was thoroughly discredited as a fabricator years ago. Max Holland, the author of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (and with whom I watched the new film), blew apart one falsehood this same Underwood had peddled to Seymour Hersh: that in 1960 he was ordered by a JFK aide to follow JFK’s one-time mistress, Judith Exner, on a train from Washington, D.C., to Chicago. Moreover, in the late 1990s, when Underwood was asked by U.S. government lawyers from the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to repeat and document the Exner story and others he had told to the press, Underwood eventually recanted every one of his tall tales.

    The final report of the ARRB discussed the very same document that is the centerpiece of the film - i.e., the report of the secret plane trip by Escalante to Dallas to run Oswald. Underwood acknowledged to the board that he had a “lot of extra White House stationery left over from his work with President Johnson,” and wrote this particular note in 1992 or 1993 for Hersh’s benefit. Yet Mr. Huismann would have us believe it is one of his own exclusive discoveries. It was with good reason the ARRB discarded this uncorroborated, if not absurd, charge, now disingenuously resurrected by Messrs. Huismann and Russo.

    Aside from hearsay, careful viewers will note that the dramatic allegations are all unproved. We do not learn that both the CIA and FBI evaluated and found Ramirez’s claims to be worthless. A former Cuban archivist says he saw an Oswald-Kennedy dossier, but does not know what was in it. A retired FBI agent, Larry Keenan, claims to have read Mexican secret service documents proving that a Cuban agent--a black man with red hair--gave Oswald money and helped prepare him for the assassination. On camera, Mr. Keenan claims he was sent to Mexico to investigate but was quickly called back because LBJ wanted Oswald identified as a lone assassin. Why did Johnson call for a cover-up? According to Mr. Keenan, the new president was afraid that telling the truth about Oswald would lead to a third world war. (While Johnson was indeed worried, when he formed the Warren Commission, he told Senator Richard B. Russell to get the facts, wherever they might lead.)

    Mr. Huismann next turns to a former secretary of state, Alexander Haig, who as a young lieutenant colonel worked with the government when the attorney general was hatching plots against Mr. Castro. Mr. Haig notes that Cuba sent the U.S. government warnings that it should stop, or Cuba would act on its own in a similar fashion. According to Mr. Haig, Johnson’s cover-up was simply political: No Democrat could ever be elected if the Democratic president was shown to have let Mr. Castro get away with JFK’s murder. But Mr. Haig, like LBJ, a longtime believer in a Castro conspiracy, has only his opinion to offer - and no evidence of any kind to prove a conspiracy existed.

    Mr. Russo, the film’s researcher and writer, is a man who has written previously about these events. He has been shown to misconstrue evidence or, as Mr. Holland once wrote, leave out “anything and everything that contradicts his preferred thesis.” In that vein, the filmmakers evoke Mr. Keenan’s belief that he and the United States “blew it” and failed to follow leads. The implication is that Mr. Keenan, too, thinks G-2 was behind the assassination. The filmmakers do not mention that Mr. Keenan is reported to believe JFK was killed by rogue CIA agents--not by Mr. Castro.

    Mr. Huismann’s claim that he and Mr. Russo, in their three years of work on the documentary, have “settled the question” and proved that Mr. Castro or G-2 in Havana ordered the assassination is quite simply balderdash. As a recent article in the Mexican weekly eme-equis shows, nothing the filmmakers turned up in Mexico cements their case for a Cuban-directed conspiracy, and Mexico City is where the alleged conspiracy was hatched. If they don’t have the goods there, they don’t have the goods at all.

    Editor’s Postscript: More than a year later, the Huismann/Russo documentary has yet to be broadcast in the United States, although it was picked up by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in March 2006. Not surprisingly, the Cuban response, official and through solidarity groups, has been to attack the documentary vehemently. Huismann et al have even been accused of acting at the behest of the CIA to defame Castro. For what Der Spiegel had to say about the film in January 2006, click here.

Ron Radosh, a professor emeritus at CUNY, is an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Along with his wife, Allis, he is the author of Red Star Over Hollywood (Encounter, 2006).

This article first appeared in The New York Sun, 14 February 2006
© 2006 by Ron Radosh
Republished with permission

The Path to 9/11
Directed by David L. Cunningham
Written by Cyrus Nowrasteh
Produced by Marc Platt/Touchstone Television
Drama. 240 Minutes. 2006

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By Max Holland

 

    It’s an argument as old as the movies themselves: what obligation does Hollywood have to history? When filmmakers claim they are depicting a real event, do they enjoy complete dramatic license? Are they free to create fictional characters, compress time, conflate some events and erase others, invent dialogue, and put real people in fictional situations? Is there a point after which filmmakers risk having their license revoked?

    If there is such a limit, the ABC-TV network would seem to have violated it, judging from the public outburst over its docudrama The Path to 9/11, which was televised over two days in September and touted as “based on the 9/11 Commission Report.” Former President Clinton denounced the $40 million miniseries for not telling the truth, as did his former national security adviser Sandy Berger, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Richard Clarke, Clinton’s counter-terrorism chief, who labeled the five hours an “egregious distortion.”

    Most irksome to Berger is a fictional scene in which he declines to give the go-ahead to CIA-supported raiders in Afghanistan who have Osama bin Laden in their gunsights prior to 9/11. Before the drama was broadcast, a group of historians, headed by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote to ABC stating that the broadcast would be a “gross disservice” to the public and urged ABC to cancel it.

    ABC, owned by the Walt Disney corporation, was also the target of attacks by elements of the left/liberal blog-osphere, which were hoping to replicate an earlier and successful Internet revolt against CBS. In the fall of 2003, conservative bloggers and their supporters pummeled CBS with an estimated 80,000 angry e-mails demanding the cancellation of a planned miniseries about Ronald Reagan that was less than favorable to him. Under intense fire, CBS eventually caved and relegated what conservatives maintained was a “hit job” on Reagan to its affiliated Showtime channel and a much smaller, cable audience.

    It can be hard to find one’s bearings when such controversies erupt. Defending provably false history, or an unprovable version of events, is not a comfortable position to assume. But the alternative—censorship—is equally discomfiting. The biopic CBS axed was also insightful, in that it suggested Reagan was suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s disease while still occupying the Oval Office. It seems only a matter of time before historians recognize that keeping Reagan’s mental condition secret will rank somewhere next to Edith Wilson’s de facto role as the first woman president, i.e., running the White House after Woodrow Wilson had suffered an incapacitating stroke.

    Holding filmmakers to a standard that historians struggle to achieve misunderstands the admittedly more powerful medium, and its antecedent, the theatrical play. As Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies points out, Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of Shakespeare’s Henry V neglected to mention that the English king ordered the slaughter of hundreds of French prisoners at Agincourt. Yet no one protested Olivier’s war-time rendering of Shakespeare’s play (the great dramatist, interestingly, did not ignore the episode).

    A written history may be fully accurate without being truthful—which come to think of it, is not a bad way of thinking about the 9/11 Commission’s report. Films, on the other hand, distill and unavoidably mangle the past, even while the best ones manage to retain and convey the spirit of what happened. But attempting to censor them is ill advised. As Mark Carnes, the editor of Past Imperfect, told The Washington Spectator, “Filmmakers always manipulate the past to serve their own purposes. . . . Better to remind people incessantly that films are not history.”

    Postscript: According to a September 2007 article in the Los Angeles Times, the DVD version of The Path to 9/11 has not been released because ABC and Disney executives fear stirring up more controversy. The DVD might remind Americans, at a time when Hillary Clinton is vying for the  Democratic presidential nomination, of the Clinton administration’s abject failure to protect the nation.

This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 15 September 2006
© 2006 by Max Holland

The Men Who Killed Kennedy: The Guilty Men
Directed and Written by Nigel Turner
Produced by Nigel Turner/History Channel
Documentary. 50 Minutes. 2003

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By Max Holland

    The first allegation in print that Lyndon Johnson was not merely a bystander or witness in Dealey Plaza, but a perpetrator and the chief beneficiary of President Kennedy’s assassination, dates back to 1966. On January 31st of that year, a well-known New York dealer in autographs named Charles Hamilton put on sale a letter allegedly written by Jack Ruby. The sales catalog described the letter this way:

    Astounding confession of international importance pinpointing LYNDON B. JOHNSON as the real murderer of JOHN F. KENNEDY and the tool of a Fascist conspiracy to liquidate the Jews! Neatly written by Ruby to a fellow prisoner on slips torn from a memo pad, this [1965] letter was smuggled out of the Dallas Jail and is unpublished in any form.

    Despite questions about its provenance—and if not of uncertain provenance, then clearly evidence of Jack Ruby’s unsound mind—the letter sold for $950 to Penn Jones, the long-time editor of the Midlothian Mirror, a small newspaper in East Texas. Jones promptly published excerpts from the letter in his self-published May 1966 work Forgive My Grief, a compilation of his editorials on the assassination.[1]

    Subsequently, the insinuation that Lyndon Johnson played a role in the assassination gained many adherents in the fall of 1966 because of two factors: the increasing unpopularity of the war in Vietnam, and new questions about the probity and integrity of the Warren Report. There was a rising perception among some elements in the country that “the whole direction of American [foreign] policy” had changed since November 1963, as evinced by Vietnam, and that President Johnson had ostensibly embraced “the road of war, terror, dictatorship and profiteering.”[2]

    The coincidental but simultaneous erosion of public confidence in the Warren Report initially fed this first phenomena, and the two quickly became mutually reinforcing. If the Warren Commission’s findings were untrustworthy, then what was one supposed to make of the ostensibly drastic changes in U.S. policy?

    Initially, barbed references to Johnson’s role occurred in the cultural sphere; it was too unspeakable an insinuation to make elsewhere. In 1966, Barbara Garson, a veteran of the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, fashioned MacBird!, a play loosely based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which pointed to Johnson as being responsible for the assassination. Originally conceived as an “entertainment” for a protest rally, the play became an underground best-seller and was eventually produced as an off-Broadway play, despite criticisms that it was vulgar, cruel, and tasteless.[3]

    In fairly short order books and articles presuming to be non-fiction started leveling the same claim. One of the first was by a German-American journalist named Joachim Joesten, who was also the first author to write a book about the assassination published in the United States. That 1964 volume, Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy, was printed by the publishing house of Marzani & Munsell, and claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the employ of the CIA when he killed President Kennedy.[4] In a similar vein, Joesten asserted in Johnson the Assassin that LBJ “usurped presidential power in November 1963 by backing the conspiracy to assassinate his predecessor.”[5]

    By the end of 1966, innuendo regarding Johnson had become so commonplace that it was acceptable for a respected, if left-wing, magazine to claim in all seriousness that “if the evidence against Johnson is too weak to stand on its own feet, it is still stronger than the framed case against Lee Oswald.”[6] Indeed, inside the Johnson White House in late 1966, one of the many concerns regarding William Manchester’s forthcoming book was that Manchester’s pejorative depiction of Johnson would inadvertently feed the burgeoning belief that the president had some role in the assassination of his predecessor.[7]

    The high point of the allegation about Johnson’s involvement, in retrospect, occurred in November 1967, when New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison was the featured guest speaker at a Los Angeles convention of radio and television newsmen. Garrison famously asked the “Qui bono?” (Who benefits?) question, and then answered it: “The one man who has profited most from the assassination—your friendly president, Lyndon Johnson!”[8]

    It should always be kept in mind that Garrison represented a watershed in conspiracy thinking. Prior to his arrival on the scene in February 1967, not even the Warren Commission’s worst critics dared allege that the federal government itself was complicit in the assassination. The most serious charge had been that Washington was either incompetent, and/or too worried about where the trail of an alleged conspiracy might lead, to uncover the “real” killers.

    As long as Garrison made headlines, Johnson was an integral (albeit subordinate) element in the DA’s grand theory of the assassination, which eventually took the form of a military-industrial/CIA plot against President Kennedy because he refused to fight a ground war in Southeast Asia and, in general, end the cold war. In this scheme, Johnson usually played the role of an accessory after the fact.[9]

    When Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw collapsed in 1969, the DA’s grand conspiracy theory fell into disrepute too and allegations involving Johnson subsided. Thereafter (and until very recently) President Johnson’s involvement would only be alleged sporadically and he would seldom be labeled a primary instigator. His alleged complicity pales, for example, in comparison to the oft-heard allegations regarding CIA involvement.

    The point of this historiography is to show that the allegation of Johnson’s complicity is an old one, almost dating back to the assassination itself from the perspective of 2004. Therefore, one might plausibly argue that a balanced documentary treatment of this “theory” is justified.

The Men Who Killed Kennedy

    Nigel Turner’s The Men Who Killed Kennedy (TMWKK) premiered on England’s Central Television network as a two-part documentary in November 1988 to mark the 25th anniversary of the assassination.[10] Three additional episodes were filmed two years later and a sixth episode was added in 1995.[11] For 2003, the 40th anniversary, three new installments (“The Love Affair,” “The Smoking Guns,” and “The Guilty Men”) were added, bringing the total to nine.[12]

    Initially, the series was broadcast in the United States on the Arts & Entertainment (A&E) cable channel beginning in September 1991. The venue on A&E was a self-described “news-driven documentary” program called Investigative Reports, and for an American audience the British narrator was replaced by the authoritative-sounding, veteran U.S. newsman Bill Curtis, executive producer and host of Investigative Reports.[13] The maiden A&E broadcast occurred three months before Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” premiered and became a box-office blockbuster. “We see ourselves as the . . . responsible solution to the dialogue,” Curtis said at the time.[14]

    TMWKK appeared on A&E until 1993, the 30th anniversary of the assassination. After 1993 there seems to have been a lull of two years, after which TMWKK resurfaced beginning in 1996 on the History Channel.[15] Insofar as I am aware, TMWKK is one of the most frequently-televised and highest-rated franchises on the History Channel. Presumably it is one of the most lucrative.

    Interestingly, the History Channel has also underwritten at least one important documentary, False Witness, that is anti-conspiratorial in nature.[16] It exposes Jim Garrison’s 1967-1969 persecution of Clay Shaw as a terrible miscarriage of justice and attacks the heroic, “white-hat” depiction of Garrison in Oliver Stone’s film JFK. To my knowledge, False Witness, a 90-minute documentary, has not been rebroadcast more than once since its 2000 debut on the History Channel even though it addresses directly many of the same allegations raised in Nigel Turner’s TMWKK series.

    In and of itself, this gross imbalance in the amount of airtime devoted to contradictory documentaries is a telling indicator of the History Channel’s bias and priorities, and its near-total lack of regard for balance, objectivity, and accuracy in programs purporting to be documentaries.

A Conspiracy of Dunces

Rendezvous with Death:
    Why John F. Kennedy Had to Die
Directed by Wilfried Huismann
Written by Wilfried Huismann & Gus Russo
Produced by WDR/NHK/SWR/Radio Bremen
Documentary. 90 Minutes. 2006

Print 

By Ron Radosh

    Everyone loves conspiracy theories, and Europe is no different. First they had the best-selling French book whose author claimed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were covert actions of American intelligence; next there was the Arab world’s claim that it was an operation by Israeli intelligence. Now we have a new one--in the form of a much-hyped German television documentary, Rendezvous with Death, directed by Wilfried Huismann with the help of an American JFK assassination buff named Gus Russo. The film first aired in Germany in January and is now being readied for American distribution.

    Ulrich Deppendorf, the director of German television’s public  broadcasting network, ARD--the equivalent of PBS here--claims the documentary proves that “Lee Harvey Oswald was the final pawn in a murderous feud between Fidel Castro and the Kennedy brothers.” This writer would love nothing more than to reveal that the detestable Fidel Castro, one of the hemisphere’s few remaining communist dictators and tyrants, had a hand in President Kennedy’s murder, using Oswald as a secret top agent of Cuba’s G-2, its intelligence arm. Unfortunately, this tendentious and conspiratorial film--blending favored conspiracy theories of both the far left and far right--falls far short of the task.

    The 90-minute film offers the following line of argument. Oswald, then a 24-year-old Castro supporter, got his orders in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, where G-2 gave him the job of assassinating the American president. The job was Mr. Castro’s retaliation for the CIA’s comic and failed attempts to have Mr. Castro killed--from exploding cigars to poison in his food. Those who have not studied the hundreds of assassination books, or had a chance to read Gerald Posner’s definitive conspiracy-debunking Case Closed, might find the film compelling on first viewing.

    Over dramatic music, Mr. Huismann presents - for the “first time” of course - tapped phone calls from the Cuban Embassy in Mexico; references to secret KGB documents about Oswald; and alleged former agents from G-2, now in exile in Spain and Mexico. Each says he always knew Oswald was their former agency’s pawn. Mr. Huismann also interviews Larry Keenan, a former FBI agent who was sent to investigate in Mexico after Kennedy’s death - and quickly called back - as well as a former CIA officer named Sam Halpern, who was involved in the plots to eliminate Mr. Castro in the 1960s. But Mr. Halpern offers nothing to substantiate the film’s thesis, merely reiterating familiar stories about the attempts to assassinate Mr. Castro.

    Compelling? Hardly. First, the witnesses are all speaking second-hand; not one of them is said to have been involved in running Oswald. Take one charge made by Mr. Huismann. An unidentified but alleged FSB officer, presented in silhouette, reads from what he says is a secret telegram dated July 18, 1962, sent by the KGB (the FSB’s predecessor agency) to the Cubans. The gist of the message allegedly supports former G-2 agent Antulio Ramirez’s claim that the KGB contacted him to let him know that Oswald had gone back to the United States, and was therefore ready for some unspecified mission. We are offered no proof that such a telegram exists save for Mr. Huismann’s source’s claim. Likewise, we are told that Oswald’s attempt to kill right-wing Major General Edwin Walker in April 1963--which he fumbled--was a test run by G-2 to see whether he was capable of assassination. Again, not one iota of hard evidence is offered; it’s just  asserted that the Cubans were involved.

    The main evidence offered by Mr. Huismann and writer Gus Russo--their would-be smoking gun--is a document written on White House stationery. It says on the morning of November 22, the day JFK was killed, Fabian Escalante, the head of Cuba’s counterintelligence service and a top adviser to Mr. Castro, took off in a small passenger plane to Dallas from Mexico to personally supervise the impending assassination. After Kennedy was dead, Escalante purportedly flew back to Mexico and switched to another plane for his return to Cuba.

    Viewers are shown dramatic footage of a small plane, which we are told is “Escalante’s plane” and proves nothing. (The claim is the equivalent of someone who says he has proof that then-CIA chief of counter-intelligence James Angleton had flown into Havana in a small plane to supervise the various attempts to assassinate Mr. Castro.) We are never told how Escalante brazenly managed to fly into Dallas the day of the president’s appearance undetected by radar, immigration, or customs, and then direct a covert operation. Mr. Huismann says he got the handwritten memo, which is shown on screen, from a former JFK and LBJ aide, Martin Underwood, who asked that it not be made public until his own death.

    Why would Underwood have waited decades to release this document, when for years he was a key proponent of JFK conspiracy theories? The filmmakers do not disclose that Underwood was thoroughly discredited as a fabricator years ago. Max Holland, the author of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (and with whom I watched the new film), blew apart one falsehood this same Underwood had peddled to Seymour Hersh: that in 1960 he was ordered by a JFK aide to follow JFK’s one-time mistress, Judith Exner, on a train from Washington, D.C., to Chicago. Moreover, in the late 1990s, when Underwood was asked by U.S. government lawyers from the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to repeat and document the Exner story and others he had told to the press, Underwood eventually recanted every one of his tall tales.

    The final report of the ARRB discussed the very same document that is the centerpiece of the film - i.e., the report of the secret plane trip by Escalante to Dallas to run Oswald. Underwood acknowledged to the board that he had a “lot of extra White House stationery left over from his work with President Johnson,” and wrote this particular note in 1992 or 1993 for Hersh’s benefit. Yet Mr. Huismann would have us believe it is one of his own exclusive discoveries. It was with good reason the ARRB discarded this uncorroborated, if not absurd, charge, now disingenuously resurrected by Messrs. Huismann and Russo.

    Aside from hearsay, careful viewers will note that the dramatic allegations are all unproved. We do not learn that both the CIA and FBI evaluated and found Ramirez’s claims to be worthless. A former Cuban archivist says he saw an Oswald-Kennedy dossier, but does not know what was in it. A retired FBI agent, Larry Keenan, claims to have read Mexican secret service documents proving that a Cuban agent--a black man with red hair--gave Oswald money and helped prepare him for the assassination. On camera, Mr. Keenan claims he was sent to Mexico to investigate but was quickly called back because LBJ wanted Oswald identified as a lone assassin. Why did Johnson call for a cover-up? According to Mr. Keenan, the new president was afraid that telling the truth about Oswald would lead to a third world war. (While Johnson was indeed worried, when he formed the Warren Commission, he told Senator Richard B. Russell to get the facts, wherever they might lead.)

    Mr. Huismann next turns to a former secretary of state, Alexander Haig, who as a young lieutenant colonel worked with the government when the attorney general was hatching plots against Mr. Castro. Mr. Haig notes that Cuba sent the U.S. government warnings that it should stop, or Cuba would act on its own in a similar fashion. According to Mr. Haig, Johnson’s cover-up was simply political: No Democrat could ever be elected if the Democratic president was shown to have let Mr. Castro get away with JFK’s murder. But Mr. Haig, like LBJ, a longtime believer in a Castro conspiracy, has only his opinion to offer - and no evidence of any kind to prove a conspiracy existed.

    Mr. Russo, the film’s researcher and writer, is a man who has written previously about these events. He has been shown to misconstrue evidence or, as Mr. Holland once wrote, leave out “anything and everything that contradicts his preferred thesis.” In that vein, the filmmakers evoke Mr. Keenan’s belief that he and the United States “blew it” and failed to follow leads. The implication is that Mr. Keenan, too, thinks G-2 was behind the assassination. The filmmakers do not mention that Mr. Keenan is reported to believe JFK was killed by rogue CIA agents--not by Mr. Castro.

    Mr. Huismann’s claim that he and Mr. Russo, in their three years of work on the documentary, have “settled the question” and proved that Mr. Castro or G-2 in Havana ordered the assassination is quite simply balderdash. As a recent article in the Mexican weekly eme-equis shows, nothing the filmmakers turned up in Mexico cements their case for a Cuban-directed conspiracy, and Mexico City is where the alleged conspiracy was hatched. If they don’t have the goods there, they don’t have the goods at all.

    Editor’s Postscript: More than a year later, the Huismann/Russo documentary has yet to be broadcast in the United States, although it was picked up by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in March 2006. Not surprisingly, the Cuban response, official and through solidarity groups, has been to attack the documentary vehemently. Huismann et al have even been accused of acting at the behest of the CIA to defame Castro. For what Der Spiegel had to say about the film in January 2006, click here.

Ron Radosh, a professor emeritus at CUNY, is an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Along with his wife, Allis, he is the author of Red Star Over Hollywood (Encounter, 2006).

This article first appeared in The New York Sun, 14 February 2006
© 2006 by Ron Radosh
Republished with permission

Reel History: Should ABC Have Yanked The Path to 9/11?

The Path to 9/11
Directed by David L. Cunningham
Written by Cyrus Nowrasteh
Produced by Marc Platt/Touchstone Television
Drama. 240 Minutes. 2006

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By Max Holland

 

    It’s an argument as old as the movies themselves: what obligation does Hollywood have to history? When filmmakers claim they are depicting a real event, do they enjoy complete dramatic license? Are they free to create fictional characters, compress time, conflate some events and erase others, invent dialogue, and put real people in fictional situations? Is there a point after which filmmakers risk having their license revoked?

    If there is such a limit, the ABC-TV network would seem to have violated it, judging from the public outburst over its docudrama The Path to 9/11, which was televised over two days in September and touted as “based on the 9/11 Commission Report.” Former President Clinton denounced the $40 million miniseries for not telling the truth, as did his former national security adviser Sandy Berger, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Richard Clarke, Clinton’s counter-terrorism chief, who labeled the five hours an “egregious distortion.”

    Most irksome to Berger is a fictional scene in which he declines to give the go-ahead to CIA-supported raiders in Afghanistan who have Osama bin Laden in their gunsights prior to 9/11. Before the drama was broadcast, a group of historians, headed by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote to ABC stating that the broadcast would be a “gross disservice” to the public and urged ABC to cancel it.

    ABC, owned by the Walt Disney corporation, was also the target of attacks by elements of the left/liberal blog-osphere, which were hoping to replicate an earlier and successful Internet revolt against CBS. In the fall of 2003, conservative bloggers and their supporters pummeled CBS with an estimated 80,000 angry e-mails demanding the cancellation of a planned miniseries about Ronald Reagan that was less than favorable to him. Under intense fire, CBS eventually caved and relegated what conservatives maintained was a “hit job” on Reagan to its affiliated Showtime channel and a much smaller, cable audience.

    It can be hard to find one’s bearings when such controversies erupt. Defending provably false history, or an unprovable version of events, is not a comfortable position to assume. But the alternative—censorship—is equally discomfiting. The biopic CBS axed was also insightful, in that it suggested Reagan was suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s disease while still occupying the Oval Office. It seems only a matter of time before historians recognize that keeping Reagan’s mental condition secret will rank somewhere next to Edith Wilson’s de facto role as the first woman president, i.e., running the White House after Woodrow Wilson had suffered an incapacitating stroke.

    Holding filmmakers to a standard that historians struggle to achieve misunderstands the admittedly more powerful medium, and its antecedent, the theatrical play. As Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies points out, Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of Shakespeare’s Henry V neglected to mention that the English king ordered the slaughter of hundreds of French prisoners at Agincourt. Yet no one protested Olivier’s war-time rendering of Shakespeare’s play (the great dramatist, interestingly, did not ignore the episode).

    A written history may be fully accurate without being truthful—which come to think of it, is not a bad way of thinking about the 9/11 Commission’s report. Films, on the other hand, distill and unavoidably mangle the past, even while the best ones manage to retain and convey the spirit of what happened. But attempting to censor them is ill advised. As Mark Carnes, the editor of Past Imperfect, told The Washington Spectator, “Filmmakers always manipulate the past to serve their own purposes. . . . Better to remind people incessantly that films are not history.”

    Postscript: According to a September 2007 article in the Los Angeles Times, the DVD version of The Path to 9/11 has not been released because ABC and Disney executives fear stirring up more controversy. The DVD might remind Americans, at a time when Hillary Clinton is vying for the  Democratic presidential nomination, of the Clinton administration’s abject failure to protect the nation.

This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator, 15 September 2006
© 2006 by Max Holland

Shame on the History Channel

The Men Who Killed Kennedy: The Guilty Men
Directed and Written by Nigel Turner
Produced by Nigel Turner/History Channel
Documentary. 50 Minutes. 2003

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By Max Holland

    The first allegation in print that Lyndon Johnson was not merely a bystander or witness in Dealey Plaza, but a perpetrator and the chief beneficiary of President Kennedy’s assassination, dates back to 1966. On January 31st of that year, a well-known New York dealer in autographs named Charles Hamilton put on sale a letter allegedly written by Jack Ruby. The sales catalog described the letter this way:

    Astounding confession of international importance pinpointing LYNDON B. JOHNSON as the real murderer of JOHN F. KENNEDY and the tool of a Fascist conspiracy to liquidate the Jews! Neatly written by Ruby to a fellow prisoner on slips torn from a memo pad, this [1965] letter was smuggled out of the Dallas Jail and is unpublished in any form.

    Despite questions about its provenance—and if not of uncertain provenance, then clearly evidence of Jack Ruby’s unsound mind—the letter sold for $950 to Penn Jones, the long-time editor of the Midlothian Mirror, a small newspaper in East Texas. Jones promptly published excerpts from the letter in his self-published May 1966 work Forgive My Grief, a compilation of his editorials on the assassination.[1]

    Subsequently, the insinuation that Lyndon Johnson played a role in the assassination gained many adherents in the fall of 1966 because of two factors: the increasing unpopularity of the war in Vietnam, and new questions about the probity and integrity of the Warren Report. There was a rising perception among some elements in the country that “the whole direction of American [foreign] policy” had changed since November 1963, as evinced by Vietnam, and that President Johnson had ostensibly embraced “the road of war, terror, dictatorship and profiteering.”[2]

    The coincidental but simultaneous erosion of public confidence in the Warren Report initially fed this first phenomena, and the two quickly became mutually reinforcing. If the Warren Commission’s findings were untrustworthy, then what was one supposed to make of the ostensibly drastic changes in U.S. policy?

    Initially, barbed references to Johnson’s role occurred in the cultural sphere; it was too unspeakable an insinuation to make elsewhere. In 1966, Barbara Garson, a veteran of the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, fashioned MacBird!, a play loosely based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which pointed to Johnson as being responsible for the assassination. Originally conceived as an “entertainment” for a protest rally, the play became an underground best-seller and was eventually produced as an off-Broadway play, despite criticisms that it was vulgar, cruel, and tasteless.[3]

    In fairly short order books and articles presuming to be non-fiction started leveling the same claim. One of the first was by a German-American journalist named Joachim Joesten, who was also the first author to write a book about the assassination published in the United States. That 1964 volume, Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy, was printed by the publishing house of Marzani & Munsell, and claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the employ of the CIA when he killed President Kennedy.[4] In a similar vein, Joesten asserted in Johnson the Assassin that LBJ “usurped presidential power in November 1963 by backing the conspiracy to assassinate his predecessor.”[5]

    By the end of 1966, innuendo regarding Johnson had become so commonplace that it was acceptable for a respected, if left-wing, magazine to claim in all seriousness that “if the evidence against Johnson is too weak to stand on its own feet, it is still stronger than the framed case against Lee Oswald.”[6] Indeed, inside the Johnson White House in late 1966, one of the many concerns regarding William Manchester’s forthcoming book was that Manchester’s pejorative depiction of Johnson would inadvertently feed the burgeoning belief that the president had some role in the assassination of his predecessor.[7]

    The high point of the allegation about Johnson’s involvement, in retrospect, occurred in November 1967, when New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison was the featured guest speaker at a Los Angeles convention of radio and television newsmen. Garrison famously asked the “Qui bono?” (Who benefits?) question, and then answered it: “The one man who has profited most from the assassination—your friendly president, Lyndon Johnson!”[8]

    It should always be kept in mind that Garrison represented a watershed in conspiracy thinking. Prior to his arrival on the scene in February 1967, not even the Warren Commission’s worst critics dared allege that the federal government itself was complicit in the assassination. The most serious charge had been that Washington was either incompetent, and/or too worried about where the trail of an alleged conspiracy might lead, to uncover the “real” killers.

    As long as Garrison made headlines, Johnson was an integral (albeit subordinate) element in the DA’s grand theory of the assassination, which eventually took the form of a military-industrial/CIA plot against President Kennedy because he refused to fight a ground war in Southeast Asia and, in general, end the cold war. In this scheme, Johnson usually played the role of an accessory after the fact.[9]

    When Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw collapsed in 1969, the DA’s grand conspiracy theory fell into disrepute too and allegations involving Johnson subsided. Thereafter (and until very recently) President Johnson’s involvement would only be alleged sporadically and he would seldom be labeled a primary instigator. His alleged complicity pales, for example, in comparison to the oft-heard allegations regarding CIA involvement.

    The point of this historiography is to show that the allegation of Johnson’s complicity is an old one, almost dating back to the assassination itself from the perspective of 2004. Therefore, one might plausibly argue that a balanced documentary treatment of this “theory” is justified.

The Men Who Killed Kennedy

    Nigel Turner’s The Men Who Killed Kennedy (TMWKK) premiered on England’s Central Television network as a two-part documentary in November 1988 to mark the 25th anniversary of the assassination.[10] Three additional episodes were filmed two years later and a sixth episode was added in 1995.[11] For 2003, the 40th anniversary, three new installments (“The Love Affair,” “The Smoking Guns,” and “The Guilty Men”) were added, bringing the total to nine.[12]

    Initially, the series was broadcast in the United States on the Arts & Entertainment (A&E) cable channel beginning in September 1991. The venue on A&E was a self-described “news-driven documentary” program called Investigative Reports, and for an American audience the British narrator was replaced by the authoritative-sounding, veteran U.S. newsman Bill Curtis, executive producer and host of Investigative Reports.[13] The maiden A&E broadcast occurred three months before Oliver Stone’s film “JFK” premiered and became a box-office blockbuster. “We see ourselves as the . . . responsible solution to the dialogue,” Curtis said at the time.[14]

    TMWKK appeared on A&E until 1993, the 30th anniversary of the assassination. After 1993 there seems to have been a lull of two years, after which TMWKK resurfaced beginning in 1996 on the History Channel.[15] Insofar as I am aware, TMWKK is one of the most frequently-televised and highest-rated franchises on the History Channel. Presumably it is one of the most lucrative.

    Interestingly, the History Channel has also underwritten at least one important documentary, False Witness, that is anti-conspiratorial in nature.[16] It exposes Jim Garrison’s 1967-1969 persecution of Clay Shaw as a terrible miscarriage of justice and attacks the heroic, “white-hat” depiction of Garrison in Oliver Stone’s film JFK. To my knowledge, False Witness, a 90-minute documentary, has not been rebroadcast more than once since its 2000 debut on the History Channel even though it addresses directly many of the same allegations raised in Nigel Turner’s TMWKK series.

    In and of itself, this gross imbalance in the amount of airtime devoted to contradictory documentaries is a telling indicator of the History Channel’s bias and priorities, and its near-total lack of regard for balance, objectivity, and accuracy in programs purporting to be documentaries.