JFK Revisited: Through The Looking Glass

 

If the last few years has taught us anything it’s that uninformed conspiracy theories on the internet are a genuine danger to life. And when you think about conspiracy theorists through history, before the popularity of the web and social media, these people are nuts, right? They obsessively go over things that most of us have put right out of our minds. Nobody wants to be a nutter on the internet or anywhere… right?

Well since Oliver Stone’s peerless film about the Kennedy Assassination and the only man to attempt to prosecute it, attitudes to the killing have changed. More documents were de-classified as a consequence of interest in the case. But historians rose to challenge its central thesis: that Kennedy was assassinated because he wanted to end the Vietnam war. He spoke of universal peace and this flew in the face of those who wanted to perpetuate warfare. This is the Military-Industrial Complex that we are warned of in the movie right at the beginning, through a real speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower—who knew the reality of war.

Kennedy was shot in Dallas whilst his motorcade took a turn past a tall building and continued towards an underpass. The sniper was placed at a window of the sixth floor of the School Book Depository. Lee Harvey Oswald was an employee at the Depository and was arrested later at a cinema having apparently fled, having fired three shots at the President, killing him with an entry wound to the head from the back, and injuring Senator John Connally. Three shell cases were found, so three bullets must have been fired from a rifle which had been ordered under an alias. There were many problems with this version of the event, but the Warren Commission which investigated the killing said that Oswald was the only killer.

Oliver Stone’s new documentary uses the rapid editing style of the movie, with Whoopi Goldberg providing the narrative of the first half. One of the most famous theories about the killing—the magic bullet theory that a single bullet caused several wounds in two different men—was mocked in the original film but here is completely demolished. The bullet was held as evidence but the trail of who had the evidence—and when—has been found to have been falsified. Maybe this is why the bullet that was presented looked so pristine? Also, the rifle that was found doesn’t match the rifle that was ordered by Oswald. It is not the rifle that the man is holding in photographs found later at his home. Additionally, President Kennedy’s autopsy which should have been conducted in Dallas was instead done in Washington, and not by experienced pathologists but by younger men whose requests for assistance were denied.

The movie centres on the Cuban connection and events in New Orleans after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Where the documentary returns to the politics, and especially when Stone widens the scope and connects the Kennedy Assassination to others and implicates the CIA, the story becomes a little bit more challenging. We just don’t know if CIA Director Richard Helms really was, as Stone has alleged, a fascist. It is possible that when Oswald defected to Russia he was doing so as part of a plan to return and become a CIA asset. We hear that Gerald Ford (who was on the Warren Commission) told people that they actually believed that there was a conspiracy but were not able to prove it. Based on what we’re told by many people, the cover up was pretty massive. There’s also something to the motorcades that Kennedy was in during trips to Florida and Chicago, all involving a turn by a tall building, and with a cipher figure identified as a supposed ‘patsy’ in rehearsals for the Dallas assassination or even other assassination attempts.

Why? Donald Sutherland narrates the second half of the documentary—with the wider political situation, the alleged corruption of the CIA, and the why… President Kennedy wasn’t perfect but he has in death been celebrated and people have wondered what he might have done had he lived. Subsequent Presidents have not been able or willing to do much about the allegedly super-powerful CIA and this is all still shrouded in secrecy and sounds particularly paranoid. It was Sutherland’s character in the movie: Mr X, who was made up but based on a real person (often dismissed as a paranoid fantasist). But it is X who asks the question: Why?

But Robert Kennedy Jr is given the final word and it’s important to remember that JFK was brutally murdered in public and his body subjected to grotesque indignities. His alleged murderer was possibly not even where he was placed by the subsequent investigation and the rifle might not have been the rifle that he ordered. And one of the bullets he allegedly fired went missing, as did the brain of the man he shot it into. The number of eye-witnesses was relatively small, and many of them were discredited, but Abraham Zapruder filmed it, and that simple fact changed everything. This is a murder that most people shrug off as solved, but this film demonstrates that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have been convicted of the killing because the evidence against him turned out to be fairly unsupportable. It is a film that’s essential viewing for anyone who believes that the truth of this assassination matters.