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.

Josiah “Tink” Thompson, for example, who is prominently featured in Oswald’s Ghost, was an assistant professor at Haverford College, specializing in the existentialist philosopher Kierkegaard, before he decided, in the mid 1960s, to become a Dealey Plaza Irregular, a.k.a. conspiracy buff. His chosen area of specialization—every conspiracy buff marked off turf—was what happened in Dealey Plaza, a point of inquiry selected on the basis that it was the threshold question. As Thompson rightly observes in the documentary, “You can’t answer any of the other questions like, who did it, or why did they do it, until you know what happened with some degree of precision.”

    Thompson’s 1967 conclusion, published after careful study of the Zapruder film and the evidence assembled by the Warren Commission, was that four shots had been fired from three guns in the infamous (and bogus) duration of six seconds.[2] Thompson’s finding was risible, and no other person or panel of sound mind has ever concurred. Perhaps only a student of existential philosophy could have taken a mass of contradictory and complementary aural, visual, and forensic facts and produced an analysis that could not withstand five minutes’ scrutiny.

    Yet, in Robert Stone’s telling, no one confronts or contradicts Thompson when he recites his discredited finding. If anything, the documentary lends credence to the absurd by suggesting that the Warren Commission’s single-bullet conclusion was a concoction, rather than a rock-solid explanation derived after taking into account all the irrefutable forensic and ballistic facts. Not only is Thompson allowed to survive unscathed, he is mined for a Delphic pronouncement. “As long as a mystery resides at the center of this case, it can’t be closed,” Thompson intones at the outset of Oswald’s Ghost.

    While there certainly still are some minor mysteries about the assassination that strain explanation, there is nothing close to a mystery so central and of such moment that the case cannot be closed. There may never be a last word on the assassination, as Oswald’s Ghost avers, but anyone who buys Thompson’s sophistry is engaged in a willful act of denying the knowable.

Although the rehabilitation of Thompson is bad enough, Robert Stone also empowers Mark Lane—the walking embodiment of a shyster—to reincarnate himself again as the Émile Zola of the Kennedy assassination.[3] When Lane refers to his December 1963 piece in the now-defunct National Guardian —an article that pointed out all the reasons why Oswald was allegedly innocent of the double murder on November 22 (he killed DPD Officer J.D. Tippit after fleeing Dealey Plaza)—there is no talking head to point out that Lane knew next to nothing about the case when he wrote that article, save what had appeared in the media. He hadn’t visited Dallas, and he hadn’t spoken to any witnesses or investigators. The Guardian article was “riddled with inaccuracies and unsupported suppositions,” as Hugh Aynesworth has written.[4]

    And is it not of some significance that the KGB “correctly identified . . . Lane as the most talented of the first wave of conspiracy theorists?”[5] Lane was so skilled, in fact, that he was deemed worthy of a subsidy, as his articles and lectures were very complementary to Soviet propaganda and lies about the assassination.

    These facts about Thompson and Lane point to the real complexity of what happened after the assassination, and what it did to America.[6] But you will not find those answers in Robert Stone’s “politically correct” treatment.

    Stone’s failure in this regard is all the more noticeable because AMERICAN EXPERIENCE—“television’s longest-running, most-watched history series”—according to PBS—seems unofficially to have adopted as its animating principle a sensible observation articulated by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. “History is to the nation as memory is to the individual,” Schlesinger once wrote. “As a person deprived of memory becomes disoriented and lost, not knowing where he has been or where he is going, so a nation denied a conception of its past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.”[7]

    Putting aside the problematic fact that the historian who penned these words was himself a major dissembler of the assassination’s historical context, Robert Stone’s approach does little to set right our conception of the recent past. If anything, Oswald’s Ghost perpetuates and extends the confusion, notwithstanding that the documentary ends by showing the old buff Norman Mailer finally, albeit reluctantly, coming ’round to the official story. By then the damage has been done.

In 100 years, when the aftermath of the assassination genuinely is grist for historians, they will look back and recognize that while Lee Harvey Oswald gave the American people “something to think about,” in his inimitable fashion, he was instrumental in, but far from responsible for, all the subsequent damage that befell American society.[8] As Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a member of Washington Decoded’s editorial board, wrote in a June 2007 essay on Oswald, the larger portion of that responsibility lies with the conspiracy buffs.

[They] have gone to superhuman lengths to avoid facing the truth. They have constructed wildly-implausible scenarios, far-out, fictitious “conspirators,” and have scandalously maligned the motives of Kennedy’s successor, rather than take a hard look at the man who actually did it. They have, ironically, done more to poison American political life than Lee Oswald—with the most terrible of intentions—was able to do.

  To be sure, this isn’t the first time persons without scruples have sought to exploit,for political, personal, or financial gain, a terrible event in US history. The conspiracy-mongering in the wake of the Kennedy assassination had its antecedent in the wave of books and articles that followed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln nearly a century earlier. But it is instructive to recall that whereas it took 75 years before a writer dared accuse the federal government of complicity in Lincoln’s murder, it took less than four years before a mendacious district attorney from New Orleans essentially charged the CIA with having its finger on the trigger that killed Kennedy.[9]

    It is somewhat ironic, then, that the only notorious conspiracy buff who comes off badly in Oswald’s Ghost is this very same district attorney, Jim Garrison. Perhaps it was because he was not around to explain himself anymore, having died in 1992. In point of fact, however, Mark Lane, Josiah Thompson, and Edward J. Epstein (the latter being the cleverest, and most pernicious, of the bunch) deserve to be lumped and exposed together with Garrison,although Stone does not see it that way.

    It is odd and certainly unintentional, but Oswald’s Ghost represents a kind of book-end to that other notable film treatment of the assassination by the more famous Stone named Oliver. Both films purport to be about one thing, but in actuality, are about another.

    Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK, claimed that the Warren Commission’s version of events was a myth, and that the movie represented “the inner spiritual meaning of the assassination.”[10] In truth, JFK was genuinely about the temporary bout of insanity that gripped New Orleans and much of America in 1967, instigated by an audacious demagogue, Garrison, who unfortunately held a position of state power.

    Similarly, Robert Stone’s film claims to be about what the assassination did to the nation, but in time it will come to be seen for what it is: the latest example of a cosseted, self-absorbed generation’s inability to come to grips with the occasional and chance cruelties of real life.

Editor’s Note: Oswald’s Ghost is having a special public screening on November 19 at the Texas Theater in Oak Cliff, the Dallas neighborhood where Oswald was apprehended just after murdering Officer J.D. Tippit in cold blood. Subsequently, the documentary will be released in a limited number of movie theaters nationwide, prior to being aired on PBS’s AMERICAN EXPERIENCE on 14 January 2008.

                           

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Another documentary involving Oswald and his deed, but one that has not found a US distributor, is American Assassin, a joint production of Denver filmmaker Robert Bayne and Minsk Channel 8 in Belarus, the only independent broadcast TV station in that former Soviet republic. Three years in the making, the 2006 documentary is the first to delve deeply into the 2½ years Oswald spent in Minsk, Byelorussia, at the height of the Cold War. He was not yet 20 years old when he defected to the Soviet Union in September 1959, and not quite 23 when he returned to the United States, bitterly disappointed in Moscow’s applied Communism.

    Bayne’s documentary is roughly the film equivalent of Norman Mailer’s 1995 book, Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery. As did Mailer, the documentary views the assassination primarily through the lens of Oswald’s sojourn in Minsk. Both emphasize and draw from, with good effect, the local KGB surveillance files on Oswald, which were exhaustive. (The publicity material accompanying the documentary states that at one point the filmmakers were threatened by the Belarusian KGB, but gives no specifics). Both interviewed Belarusians who came into contact with Oswald. In Bayne’s case, he managed a rare interview with Erich Titovyets, a medical student at the time, who became, by all accounts, Oswald’s closest friend and associate in Minsk. Bayne also managed to snag Oswald’s assigned Russian-language tutor, Stanislav Shushkevich, who just happened to become the first president of an independent Belarus (the former Byelorussia) when the Communist imperium of 15 republics fractured in 1991.

    Although it’s clear the production was done on a shoe-string budget, the production values are solid if not of the highest caliber. Archival film from the late 1950s, including rare footage from the radio/TV factory where Oswald “worked” (he was a slacker) effectively transports the viewer back in time and place. The outline of the story of how Oswald navigated between the superpowers is familiar enough by now, if still somewhat incredible. A 19-year-old ex-Marine, self-taught in pidgin Russian, Oswald traveled to Moscow on a tourist visa in October 1959 and declared his allegiance to the Soviet state. Low-ranking officials took him for an intelligence operative (by 1959, Americans had long ceased coming to live in the socialist paradise) and turned him away. Oswald responded by slashing his wrist, which was enough to get the decision reversed.

    Oswald was then sent into internal exile to Minsk, where there were no foreign journalists, and was placed under continuous surveillance, assigned a menial job but relatively high income, and given a sought-after apartment in the center of town (all the better for surveillance purposes). After a love affair that ended badly, and as the dreariness and regimentation of Soviet life set in once he ceased to be the center of attention, Oswald retrieved his discarded US passport and returned to America in June 1962, with a wife he married on the rebound. If he was going to be reduced to singing Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” at vodka-filled parties that were the only respite from the endless winters in Minsk, it made more sense to go back in the United States.

    It has always been something of a puzzle why the Soviets let Oswald go back, much less take a trained Soviet citizen with him (his wife, Marina, was a pharmacist). Other Americans who defected and subsequently expressed similar desires were sent to rot in the far reaches of the Soviet Union, or, at best, live out their lives in desperation in Moscow. Bayne’s documentary, however, supplies a vivid and rational answer: Oswald was a terrific, unwanted burden to the Soviet state. Although he was exactly what he appeared to be, the KGB remained unwilling to lift its intense surveillance of the strange young American, a task that absorbed enormous amounts of manpower and resources even though Oswald’s daily life was circumscribed by the KGB’s pre-planned but largely invisible borders.

    The documentary convincingly asserts that the Oswald file represented one of the most extensive in-country surveillances of one man ever conducted during the Soviet era. When he proved an indifferent, even hostile, worker, which rendered him useless for propaganda purposes, and after Oswald consistently refused the lures placed in front of him—for a time, he worked adjacent to the experimental section of the radio-TV factory, to see if he exhibited an inordinate interest in new technology—the Soviets grabbed at the chance to be rid of the nettlesome foreigner. “We don’t want him . . . let the Americans have him,” was the evaluation, and so the KGB permitted his letters to reach the US embassy in Moscow, and eventually Oswald got his passport back. The documentary gives this notion more sense than ever before.

    From among all the Belarusians interviewed for the documentary, the most insight into Oswald’s personality comes from Dr. Erich Titovyets, who had never been willing to be interviewed for a Western production before, and who even eluded Mailer while he was conducting extensive interviews in Minsk for his 1995 book. Unlike many of Oswald’s “friends,” who actually befriended him for the purpose of informing on him to the local KGB, Titovyets seems to have been genuine. He sought Oswald out, though he was reluctant to impose, because he wanted to improve his English-language skills by conversing with a native speaker. Titovyets initially thought Oswald was an intellectual and cultured, but soon learned otherwise. The American was a very simple-minded young man, and poorly educated. Yet they remained friends, if only because Oswald was such a novelty who gave no indication of being around for a long time. “When you entered Oswald’s apartment, the impression was that Oswald was sitting on his suitcase,” Titovyets recalled. What he mainly learned from the young American was how to cuss in English, and play poker.

    One can think of several characters who are conspicuously missing from the documentary. Robert Oswald, who tried to reason with his erratic younger brother when he renounced his American citizenship, is not interviewed, nor is Priscilla Johnson McMillan, one of two journalists to question Oswald in Moscow when he was still brimming with hope about his new life as a socialist man. For that matter, Richard Snyder, the US embassy officer who dealt most directly with Oswald both in 1959 and 1961-62, might have shed some fascinating light on their interactions. Then, of course, there is also Marina Oswald, née Prusakova. Budget constraints probably prevented the producers rounding out the documentary with such interviews. Marina Oswald reportedly demands tens of thousands of dollars before she will consent to be filmed answering questions.

    The primary problem with American Assassin, however, is not so much who is missing but the misguided effort to draw a straight line from Minsk to Dallas. While Oswald’s excursion to the Soviet Union, and experience with socialism as it really existed, was formative, it was not determinative. The coda in the documentary tries to make that case, and in the process glosses over much that was eventful in Oswald’s life between June 1962 and November 1963—not least of all, his attempt on the life of former Army Major General Edwin A. Walker. A notorious right-winger, Walker was criticizing the Kennedy administration for, among otherthings, spreading the “big L-I-E that to do anything regarding Cuba would bring on an atomic war.”[11] Assassinating Walker was the reason why Oswald purchased his Mannlicher-Carcano in March and used it for the first time in April. To argue, in effect, that politics no longer animated Oswald after his experience with really-existing socialism does not square with the facts of his life after he returned to the United States, and especially his new infatuation with the Communist revolution taking place in Cuba.

    As with Mailer’s book, American Assassin would have been better conceived  as Oswald in Minsk. To shed as much light as possible on his life in that long-suffering, ancient city more than justifies a documentary. Trying to stretch that chapter to encompass what Oswald did on November 22 only diminishes what the producers were trying to accomplish.

    Editor’s Note: American Assassin can be purchased as a DVD by clicking here.

                                       

[1] The participants are Hugh Aynesworth, a Dallas Morning News reporter in 1963; historian Robert Dallek, the author of biographies of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson; Edward J. Epstein, who wrote three books on the subject, including Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth (1966); Professor Todd Gitlin, a historian of the New Left; former Senator Gary Hart (D-Colorado); Tom Hayden; Mark Lane, author of several books about the assassination, including Rush to Judgment (1966); Norman Mailer, author of the 1995 book, Oswald’s Tale; Priscilla Johnson McMillan, author of the 1977 book Marina and Lee, a biography of the Oswalds; Dan Rather, a reporter with the CBS television network in 1963; Josiah Thompson, author of Six Seconds in Dallas (1967). Aynesworth, McMillan, and Rather are the only participants with first-hand exposure to the case, and long-enunciated, non-conspiratorial views of the assassination.

[2] Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination (New York: Bernard Geis, 1967), 195.

[3] Steven Brill, “The Case Against Mark Lane,” Esquire, 13 February 1979. Brill concluded that Lane, who he described as “loud, venal, and truthless,” was constantly driven by only two motives: profit and headlines.

[4] Hugh Aynesworth with Stephen G. Michaud, JFK: Breaking the News (Richardson, TX: International Focus Press, 2003), 223.

[5] Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 227-228.

[6] For a recent work that address some of the issues Stone ignores, see James Piereson, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (New York: Encounter Books, 2007).

[7] Schlesinger, “History and National Stupidity,” New York Review of Books, 27 April 2006.

[8] Oswald spoke these words to Priscilla Johnson McMillan in Moscow on 16 November 1959.

[9] Otto Eisenschiml, a chemist-turned historian, claimed in a 1937 best-selling book, Why Was Lincoln Murdered?, that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton organized the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln. William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 163-184.

[10] Robert Brent Toplin, ed., Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History, and Controversy (Lawrence, KN: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 298.

[11] AP, “Walker Says ’US or UN’ To Be Main Issue in 1964,” Dallas Morning News, 15 June 1963.

© 2007 by Max Holland

Comments

[Tennent H. Bagley]

It is refreshing and heartening to get this sensible, well-informed, and articulate review in timely fashion, before the Robert Stone documentary can become accepted as new "truth" the way Oliver Stone's film "JFK" was. Max Holland sees and exposes how the documentary has the effect, intended or not, of contributing to, rather than suppressing,the virulent epidemic of conspiracy theory. Well done!

[Robert Stone]

ROBERT STONE RESPONDS:

While you are well deserving of considerable respect for your many years of work in digging at the truth of the Kennedy assassination, there is one critical element that I feel you have gotten fundamentally wrong, and two additional serious misjudgments. They are important and they go to the very heart of your criticism of my film, Oswald’s Ghost.

First and foremost, four decades after the assassination of President Kennedy the cultural mythology surrounding this pivotal event in our nations history borders on the theological for a whole host of very complex reasons. To fail to recognize this fact, to ignore it, or to simply wish it were otherwise is to misunderstand what is perhaps the most important and pernicious aspect of this case. Your belief that all the damage can be undone by a clever and well-presented demonstration of the facts is as naïve as it is misguided. It’s akin to attempting to deny the existence of God by searching for conclusive proof that Jesus never rose from the dead. You may be armed with the facts but you’re engaged in a thoroughly a pointless exercise. There is a truth to what happened in Dallas and it's important. But you can't simply bully, belittle and carpet-bomb those who disagree with you and expect to win any hearts and minds. We've found that out the hard way in recent years in an international situation that's not entirely dissimilar. You would do well to take note of the results.

Secondly, your apparent belief that all those who promote the idea that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK are charlatans, dissemblers, prevaricators, or just plain liars is as absurd as trying to claim that all those who assert that Oswald acted alone are de facto righteous and just. If only this debate were so neatly defined in black and white. The problem of discerning what is the difference between “the charlatan and the truth-teller", between fact and fiction, is one that confronts every American everyday on an endless stream of issues. Nobody who doesn’t devote a good chunk of their life to this can independently know what happened in Dallas, the wealth of conflicting information out there is too vast. In this, like in most things, it comes down to whom you choose to believe, or disbelieve. Allowing an audience to discern for themselves who is more credible within the context of a carefully crafted narrative is my chosen method of persuasion, and I stand by it. In screenings around the country, many viewers have at least begun to question some of their preconceptions about the assassination as a result of seeing the film. When millions of Americans see this film on PBS/American Experience or buy the DVD, I’m hopeful that it will encourage a significant number of them to begin to reassess their views, or at the very least to question some of what has become “common knowledge” about the assassination.

Thirdly, you express a remarkable distrust for the basic common sense of the American people, and for Public Television viewers in particular. This perhaps is a basic philosophical disposition that I simply don’t share with you. If someone who watches my film can’t determine the relative credibility of Mark Lane and Robert Dallek for instance, then what on earth makes you think they’ll be swayed by the hackneyed “omniscient voice of reason” you so wish I had relied upon to enlighten them? In any case, how often have the American people been sold a load of rubbish with this same authoritative tone? Certainly, American’s basic common sense has taken a holiday under particular traumatic circumstances, this being perhaps a penultimate example, but that’s part of what this film is all about. To extrapolate that the majority of Americans are a bunch of ignorant dupes seems to me to be more than a little condescending. In short, your apparent belief that you have to be an idiot to believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy flies in the face of reality. This at least does not comport with my experience in talking to hundreds of people about this over the years.

The question arises then, how do you reexamine such a pivotal event in history in a way that can begin to chip away at the mind-boggling edifice of falsehoods that surrounds most Americans understanding the assassination? More importantly, how do you engage a younger generation of Americans who simply assume, without any knowledge of (or interest in) the facts, that the Government covered-up Kennedy's assassination - or worse? One place to start, in my opinion, is to explore and to explain the history of these ideas. How did they arise? Who propagated them? How did they take root? Why were they so widely embraced? What impact have they had? In this context, people like Mark Lane and Josiah Thompson are historical figures, regardless of what you may think of them and regardless of whether or not what they have to say is factually correct. Rightly or wrongly, their views contributed to how a great many Americans came to perceive the assassination of JFK.

You go to great lengths in chastising me for "empowering" Mark Lane and "rehabilitating" Josiah Thompson (I thought I just interviewed them) without bothering to even mention, except in distant a footnote, that the film prominently features interviews with conspiracy critics like Robert Dallek, Dan Rather, Hugh Aynesworth, Todd Gitlin and Priscilla McMillan. Didn’t I empower or rehabilitate any of them as well? I don’t think mentioning this important fact to your readers would have undermined the thrust of your critique, which I think is misguided for other reasons, but your failure to do so, I’m sorry to say, betrays a certain disingenuousness in the presentation of your argument.

Your dismissive claim that I have nothing new to say is also as inaccurate as it is insulting. Please point out any documentary film that has explicitly taken on the subject of the impact of the conspiracy theories on American political culture. I can't think of a single one. Is there a book on the subject? If so I can't think of one that does much more than mention it in passing. There have been articles and academic papers that deal with this (some by you) but that's about it. For the vast majority of Americans, discussion about the Kennedy assassination has been reduced to a mind-numbing debate over bullet trajectories and forensics or vague notions of conspiratorial collusion by the a veritable laundry list of evil-doers.

You state (wrongly) that the premise of my film is that it’s not important to establish a position on the assassination in order to make a film about it. I couldn’t disagree more. I can’t imagine making a film about this or anything else without taking a position on it. You then go on to admit, rather reluctantly, that I do indeed establish my position on the assassination but then belittle it by saying that “the damage is already done” by the time I get around to it. That I get around to collapsing the conspiracy theories throughout the entire last third of the film is reduced in your mind to a “contemporary conceit” and “fashionable nonsense.” This not so subtle attempt to peg me as a “politically correct” relativist simply doesn’t hold up. Only one reviewer has claimed that I fail take a stand on the assassination (it features prominently in a Google search) but that reviewer never even saw the film – he couldn’t have as his review was published days before the film was first screened and no advance copies of it were ever given out. So this idea that the film lacks a position is nothing more than recycled hogwash.

Finally, in a rather strange twist of logic, you attack me for being unfair to Jim Garrison because he's dead and can't defend himself. Garrison is the major target of scrutiny in my film not because I’m too timid to take on anyone who’s alive, but because of the way he was mythologized in Oliver Stone's "JFK", as well as for the fact that his investigation launched a thousand conspiracy theories that form the basis for much of the contemporary mythology surrounding the case. Far more Americans today were influenced by Oliver Stone's depiction of Jim Garrison than by anything Mark Lane or Josiah Thompson ever wrote. Moreover, I had cinematically clear and compelling evidence that he was a fraud. Have others employed the similar methods? Of course. But Garrison was more than just a private citizen writing a book. He was a public official conducting an official inquiry. This and many other things puts him in a class by himself and thus warrants the special scrutiny we afforded him.

Ultimately this film, like nearly all of my films, attempts to persuade the audience to make an effort to think more critically, to question dogmatic and politically correct assumptions, and to discern (without the aid of an “omniscient voice of reason”) the difference between the truth-teller and the charlatan. This, to me, is the essential first step on the long road to recovering our history.

[Max Holland]

When I intend to review a book or a film, I steer clear of other people's comments. I purposely did not read anything about the film, except the PR material, before seeing it and writing the review. For Stone to suggest otherwise . . . well, that is hogwash.

[Marc Schneider]

Presenting Mark Lane and the other crackpots in what is ostensibly a serious documentary and then claiming that your intent is to "persuade the audience to think more critically ..." is pure crap. That would be like doing a piece on travel and having people from the Flat Earth Society. The fact that a lot of people accept them is no reason to present their views as reputable theories. Like it or not, this lends credibility to these people that they don't deserve. I guess one argument would be that they will discredit themselves but that is unlikely, given the lack of knowledge most people have about this subject. The fact is, many people do not have the ability or time to deconstruct a crackpot theory. Thus, many took Oliver Stone's movies as a factual analysis of the assassination even though it was primarily a means for funneling Stone's totally unsubstantiated belief that JFK was killed because he would have withdrawn from Viet Nam.

[Mel Ayton]

If Robert Stone had spent any real time debating these conspiracy buffs during the making of his documentary his conclusions about them – i.e. they are not all charlatans, dissemblers, prevaricators and plain liars – may have been different. I would conclude - having debated many in my time - that every one of them has, in some way, distorted history and they did it knowingly. When exposed to incontrovertible facts they simply move the argument in a different direction and avoid dealing with the overwhelming evidence which puts Oswald outside any plausible conspiracy theory.

One of the most significant comments made by Mark Schneider (above) was his observation that the public do not have the ability or the time to deconstruct crackpot theories. I would add that even the mainstream media do not have within their ranks any editor or journalist who has the knowledge or background experience to challenge any theory that has come their way. The result has been a constant resurrection of Mark Lane’s original ludicrous theories which are then presented to the public as ‘plausible’ explanations for JFK’s death.

Max Holland is right. It is high time the American media put an end to this gross distortion of history which endlessly gives some form of respectability to crackpots who profit from the JFK conspiracy industry.

[Pat Speer]

This review and its responses are incredibly ironic. Are people blind to the hypocrisy inherent in claiming that documentary film-makers making films about controversial issues should refuse to present both sides of the issue, and then claiming that every person arguing one of the sides "distorted history and they did it knowingly"?

Is not making such a blanket statement about others itself a distortion of history? I am a conspiracy theorist and I consider myself as patriotic, if not more patriotic, than any of the many single-assassin theorists I have encountered. America represents an ideal: a search for a just society. It's hard to see how issues can be resolved when one of the sides of an issue, a side representing over 70 percent of the population, is effectively excluded from the discussion.

[Steve Sailer]

John O'Sullivan recently offered an insightful explanation of the political and cultural significance of Kennedy conspiracy theories.

In the January 14, 2008 issue of The American Conservative, JO'Sullivan, who wrote about the failed 1981-1984 assassinations attempts on Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher in his 2006 book "The President, The Pope, and the Prime Minister," reviews James Pierseon's new book "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism." The review isn't online, but I'll quote from it:

"Piereson's first original (and brilliant) insight is his recognition that what transformed American politics was not the assassination itself but how it was interpreted.

"Kennedy was slain by a devout communist, one-time defector to the Soviet Union, and admirer or Fidel Castro who had kept in touch with Soviet diplomats after returning home from the USSR and was trying to re-defect to Cuba. A common-sense interpretation of the crime would have portrayed Kennedy as an anti-communist martyr of the conservative cause in the Cold War. Such a view would have made the Cold War -- rather than civil rights -- the central issue in U.S. politics... But such an account would have also been contrary to the emerging "spirit of the age," which dictated to commentators a very different analysis.

"Before anyone knew the identity of Kennedy's assassin, his death was at once and widely attributed in media speculations to 'extremists' and 'bigots' on the Right. ... But that conviction hardly changed once it became known that the assassin was a communist. To be sure, the newspapers dug into Oswald's career as a defector very thoroughly. But the editorials and opinion columns, their television equivalents, and the comments of the liberal and cultural leaders repeatedly and passionately blamed the assassination on something called 'extremism.'... It soon became conventional wisdom that all Americans bore a share of the blame for the bigotry, intolerance, and hate that had struck down the president. John F. Kennedy in death became a martyr for the cause of civil rights -- a cause to which in life he had shown a prudent political coolness. ...

"Piereson's second great contribution is to establish that Mrs. Kennedy herself, in the very depths of her grief, was signally responsible for inventing and spreading this misinterpretation and lifting it to the level of myth.

... These questions were answered when Mrs. Kennedy learned that the lone Oswald had killed her husband. She then complained, "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist. It even robs his death of any meaning."

"Even before the misinterpretation had become current, she had intuitively grasped both its main features and the unfortunate fact that reality did not quite measure up to them. In her arrangements for the funeral and her selection of those speaking at the various memorial services, she ensured that the misinterpretation would be the dominant theme. Finally, by dictating to Theodore White the story that Kennedy had often ended his day listening to songs from his favorite musical, "Camelot," and by insisting that it must remain in White's article over the skepticism of his editors at Life magazine, she lifted the misinterpretation to the level of myth...

"Extended to the present, these trends have produced a cultural atmosphere in which the 20th-century political figures most admired by readers of Vogue and Vanity Fair would probably be Che Guevara and Martin Luther King. Observers attentive to purely political signs -- votes, laws, opinion polls -- were inevitably late to notice this cultural shift. But a woman of fashion, who was also politically knowledgeable, was able to sense it from the surrounding atmosphere. ...

"To their surprise, however, as the radicals [in the late 1960s] rushed forward with their battering rams, the liberals opened the gates and surrendered. How could they resist? If America had killed Kennedy, then liberalism was merely a smiley face painted on a System of racist and sexist oppression. ... For a decade or so after November 1963, liberalism and its institutions were convulsed by disputes, entering the maelstrom as pragmatic, patriotic, and problem-solving bodies, and emerging from it as perfectionist, utopian, anti-American ones, secretly anxious to punish the American majority for its sins rather than solve its problems."

[Daniel Robillard]

It seems that saying all conspiracy theorists are disingenuous etc is an absurd generalization. Lyndon Johnson himself said there could have been foreign involvement in JFK's assassination during a conversation with Walter Cronkite. Does it seem logical that he was distorting history? This was a very informed man. He may simply have been commenting on something he had lived through and thought about.

Do you feel that one's IQ is linked somehow to their belief in the magic bullet theory? Again, Johnson himself thought that the magic bullet theory was wrong as did Senator Russell who was on the Warren Commission. A logical person could come to the conclusion after reviewing the facts, that the government at that time was trying to cover up the appearance of a conspiracy for purposes unknown. There is so much evidence to suggest
that the official investigation was slanted towards Oswald's guilt. I think it would be narrow minded not to accept the possibility of others being involved.
Not every conspiracy theory is plausible but neither is three shots from the 6th floor. It is small wonder only 3 in 10 American's believe the official story.

[Max]

I've posted your comment as written, but in answer to your observations, you might want to read "The Assassination Tapes" and "Hearing a Wrong Leaning, Er, Meaning" on the website.

The former explains why LBJ believed in a conspiracy against the evidence; the latter explains why LBJ's criticism of the single-bullet conclusion was not really grounded in any familiarity with the evidence.

As a general proposition, your first sentence is true. But then one must deal with the specific facts. My dismissals of conspiracy-mongering are not philosophical
propositions, but are arrived at after researching and weighing the facts.