`JFK' FUROR MAY FORCE DEBATE ON OFFICIAL SECRECY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 5, 1992                   TAG: 9201050266
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: D-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TOMMY DENTON
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
`JFK' FUROR MAY FORCE DEBATE ON OFFICIAL SECRECY
Something about the criticism of Oliver Stone's new movie, "JFK," is a little too strident, too shrill, too angry, almost desperate.
Without question, Stone has employed vast dramatic license to fashion a plot of massive conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In doing so, he has rejected the Warren Commission and other official reports that found Lee Harvey Oswald to be the sole killer, acting alone.
Within days of the events in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, suspicions of a larger conspiracy emerged. Questions arising from gaps and inconsistencies in the official record have fueled an entire conspiracy-theory industry ever since.
Stone has given cinematic life to the theory that shadowy forces - the "military-industrial complex," the CIA, the FBI, military intelligence, anti-Castro Cubans, the Mafia and on and on - conducted a coup d'etat against the president who was about to pull out of the potentially lucrative Vietnam War and initiate peace overtures with the Kremlin and Havana.
No hard evidence has emerged to prove the theory. All the official investigative files remain classified, but millions of people say that they believe such a sinister plot is more than just plausible. Recent polls indicate that 56 percent of Americans believe JFK's murder was a conspiracy.
Stone says he believes it, and his film artfully blends snippets of historical footage with the mastery of myth that is movie-making.
For his efforts, he has been the target of vitriolic commentary in the press. Tom Wicker of The New York Times, syndicated columnist George Will, George Lardner of The Washington Post, CBS anchor Dan Rather and Kenneth Auchincloss of Newsweek - firmly established commentators not customarily given to high-voltage rhetoric - are among the noted critics who have denounced the production in scathing terms.
They accuse Stone variously of perversion of the historic record, "cooking up false admissions," ignoring contrary evidence and basically lying. Indeed, George Will wrote, "In his three-hour lie, Stone falsifies so much he may be an intellectual sociopath, indifferent to truth. Or perhaps, he is just another propagandist frozen in the 1960s like a fly in amber, combining moral arrogance with historical ignorance."
Why such purple prose, when in fact so many documented inconsistencies in the official record abound 28 years after the fact and fairly invite suspicion and speculation?
Stone has made no bones that he took artistic liberties in "JFK." He was, he said, making a movie, not a historical treatise. He was a producer following the artist's creative impulses, not a district attorney bound by the rules of evidence. Too many questions remain unanswered, he said, and he sought to cast a dramatic light on the murky record so that people would be forced to reinterpret unsettled facts and events.
He wrote a rejoinder to his critics in an essay Dec. 20 in The New York Times and made a persuasive case that historical interpretations cannot always be accurate if crucial evidence remains hidden from the public by the government. Absent verifiable facts, the curious will inquire where they will.
He pointed to the difficulty - the virtual impossibility - of bringing a case against covert actions of government agencies, whether it be the JFK assassination or prosecution in the Iran-Contra scandal.
When the government is in the sole possession of the evidence, and that evidence is locked in classified secrecy for decades - or longer - skeptics naturally doubt that the stewards of secrecy will divulge embarrassing or possibly incriminating information.
Since Kennedy was slain, the American people have witnessed flagrant instances of official lies and cover-ups, most involving covert actions by government agencies: Lyndon Johnson's prosecution of the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon's Watergate; Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra. Suspicion of government motives may be unfortunate, but at least a generation of Americans has been given little choice.
If "JFK" provokes within the body politic a healthy questioning of institutional secrecy, then Stone will have made a valuable contribution to democracy. His critics may attack his work as being at odds with the available evidence of a specific train of historical events and persons, but all art distorts so as to achieve a particular perspective in the search for elusive truth.
The "official" perspective has left lingering doubts about exactly what happened, and why, in Dealey Plaza 28 years ago. Oliver Stone's conclusions may be wrong, but in "JFK" he certainly challenges the nation to a reinvigorated debate about how strict an accounting the American people should demand concerning the secrets that their government keeps from them.

Tom Denton is senior editorial writer and a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB