Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 17, 1992 TAG: 9201170533
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
CONSPIRACY IN HIGH PLACES
OLIVER STONE'S film "JFK" has raised such a ruckus amongst politicians and journalists, most of whom have denounced it as loudly and as often as possible on television, that one can easily forget that it is, after all, a movie.Dare one say "just a movie"? A movie it is, take it or leave it, but because Oliver Stone is a contentious citizen who often questions the conventional wisdom, whatever it is, any movie he makes is likely, these days, to cause a firestorm.
He did it with "Platoon," which presented a rigorously critical view of infantry fighting in Vietnam, even ending with a recruit shooting his own (by then insane) sergeant. He did it with "Wall Street," which portrayed stockbroking (a field about which Stone, in fact, knows a great deal) as frequently rapacious and immoral ("Greed is good").
Stone may not be the complete anti-establishmentarian he is often portrayed as being, but he doesn't think all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, either - and his movies say so.
"JFK" says so too. Stone, for whom as for many of us the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, was a "defining moment," is a razzle-dazzle piece of movie-making that mixes genuine news footage and invented "documentary" footage as well as outright fictional narrative film for the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's attempt to unravel the shooting.
Stone uses actor Kevin Costner to play Garrison, a shrewd move since Costner brings to the part of the lonely seeker-after-truth the illusion of integrity that Gary Cooper and James Stewart brought the Frank Capra heroes of "Meet John Doe" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," thus extending Garrison a kind of untouchability the real Garrison appears never to have won.
That is the framework, however, and though it helps tie the many links of the movie together its truth or falsity does not seriously color, I think, what Garrison slowly comes to believe.
What Garrison comes slowly to believe - what the real Jim Garrison believed but was never able to prove in the single prosecution he was able to bring in the case - is that the JFK assassination was the end result of a massive conspiracy.
Garrison, as unsatisfied as most of us are with the Warren Commission's conclusion that Kennedy was shot by a single gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, gradually unpeels, he believes, one piece of evidence after another. It indicates not only that Oswald could not have succeeded alone but that his connections with other figures, ultimately the CIA, military intelligence, the FBI, the Mafia and a circle of anti-Castroits, made him, as Oswald claimed himself, the "patsy" in a monstrously larger conspiracy.
As Garrison points out, if you believe Oswald's shooting was impossible, you have to believe a second gunman was involved; if you believe there was a second gunman, or a third or fourth, you have to believe there was a conspiracy.
No one I know - whether former serviceman or deer hunter - believes Oswald's shot was possible.
Why everyone in the United States is offended by Stone's argument - or Garrison's, as the movie portrays it - baffles me. The notion that Oswald shot that well strains credulity past what it will bear. The sequence of political murders and crimes since 1963 certainly suggests, if it does not prove, that conspiracy in high places is common. A great many people benefited by Kennedy's death.
But you do not have to accept every claim Stone makes to accept his general proposition, and that is his point, and mine here. Indeed, during the early 1970s, a movie called "Executive Action," starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, made an almost identical charge. But no one seemed to object, and the picture is not widely known. What latter-day sensitivity has Oliver Stone touched this time?
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.