Essay Preview: Jfk
Report this essay
Oliver Stones Jfk
Oliver Stones JFK was a movie about the investigation by a district attorney, Jim Garrison, about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. JFK was one of the most controversial films of its time dealing with the decades-long debate about who actually killed President Kennedy. Was it done by the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald and his magic bullet that pierced through the bodies of the two men creating seven wounds? Or was it the end result of a detailed scheme masterminded by the Mafia involving the U.S. government and military, the Cubans, and all other Kennedy-haters? Jim Garrison was determined to find out the truth of the assassination. He arrested and charged a man named Clay Shaw, who was a New Orleans businessman, because he, with the help of Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie, was said to have conspired the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
In 1969, when Jim Garrisons Conspiracy-To-Kill-Kennedy trial collapsed, his entire case that the accused, Clay Shaw, had participated in an assassination plot turned out to be based on nothing more than the hypnotized- induced story of a single witness. This witness was Perry Raymond Russo who had testified that he had had no conscious memory of his own conspiracy story before he was drugged, hypnotized, and fed hypothetical circumstances about the plot that was supposed to have witnessed by Jim Garrison. This witness acknowledged that he could not separate fantasy from reality after this bizarre treatment. This resulted in a dismay of Garrisons supporters and the resign of three members of his staff. In the movie JFK, Garrison re-emerges as a man who brilliantly solves the mystery of the Kennedy Assassination. In this version, there was no hypnosis and the reborn Garrison resourcefully uncovers cogent evidence that Clay Shaw planned the Dallas ambush of President Kennedy in New Orleans with Lee Harvey Oswald and David William Ferrie. He established that this trio worked for the CIA and were recruited into a conspiracy to seize power in Washington.
Oliver Stone succeeded in building a plausible conspiracy case against Clay Shaw, which Jim Garrison had failed doing. The original Garrison only attempted to coax, intimidate and hypnotize unable witnesses into providing him with incriminating evidence, the new Garrison, Oliver Stone, fabricated for his film the crucial evidence and witnesses that were missing in real life. Consider, for example, the way he fabricated David Ferries dramatic confession to Garrison in a hotel room only hours before he died. In reality, David Ferry had maintained his innocence insisting that he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald, that he was not part of the CIA, and that he had no knowledge of any plot to kill Kennedy. Also, the last known person to speak to Ferrie was George Lardner, Jr. of the Washington Post, who Ferrie met with from midnight to 4 a.m. Several hours later, he died from a cerebral hemorrhage (not from suicide as depicted in the movie).
There are many fictional characters Oliver Stone had added to the movie, one of which was a man named Willie OKeefe. In the movie, Ferrie first introduced him to Shaw, who hired him to participate in elaborate orgies with him and Ferrie. Through this relationship he met Shaws associates including Oswald, whom he had no problem identifying as beardless along with the anti-Castro Cubans mercenaries (including one fictional bald-one who murdered Ferrie). At one of the last-night meetings in Ferries apartment, Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw discussed the plans for killing Kennedy after the Cubans departed. This fictional story of OKeefe is supported by Ferries fictional confession, which is then followed by Ferries fictional murder by the fictional bald-headed Cuban introduced by OKeefe.
Another fictional but very essential man was “X”. “X” was a cynical man of military bearing and he met Garrison just after Ferries death on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. He refused to identify the agency he represented and denied being in the CIA. In their discussion, “X” launched into a fifteen-minute exposition of the assassination. He said that Kennedy was “executed by device as old as the crucifixion–a military firing squad.” It was not some low level plot but a full-blown “coup dйtat”. The purpose of it was to prevent Kennedy from withdrawing from Viet Nam and ending the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Since the military-industrial complex could not afford to lose this war threat, an assassination was ordered. The secret team that carried out this also arranged the “cover story” that framed Oswald as the lone assassin and sabotaged the telephone system in Washington D.C. after the assassination so no new would leak out. The day of the assassination he was ordered to accompany a group of officials on a trip to the South Pole. If he had not been sent away, he would have had the routine duty of arranging the additional security for the President, which would have made the assassination unfeasible. After he returned and realized what happened, he