Kennedys and King Test host626

Category: General

Reviews of films treating the assassinations of the 1960s, their historical and political context and aftermath, and the investigations conducted.

  • Rory Kennedy, Last Days in Vietnam

    No one who saw the films and photos of America’s 1975 retreat from Indochina can forget them. America was leaving the country. But they had made little or no accommodation for the people of South Vietnam, many of whom did not want to stay behind. In fact, the whole thing was so haphazard that it did not look like we had planned very carefully for the Americans to get out either. (Which, as we shall see, was the case.)

    As a result of all this capriciousness, the media captured the agonizing images of the Vietnamese “boat people” floating on rafts in the Pacific; of helicopters landing atop the American Embassy with refugees packed in like sardines; and above all: a helicopter on top of the CIA building in dramatic silhouette, with an endless line of civilians trying to get on board – until finally, the copter could not take any more people. And the refuges were left behind with arms outstretched trying to hang on. That image was so haunting that it has been used several times since in films about the subject, e.g. The Deer Hunter.

    For many people, especially those critical of the war, those searing – and in some ways, humiliating – images seemed to epitomize America’s long involvement in Vietnam. We were now finally leaving a country in the same way we had entered it and occupied it: in the same half-assed, scattershot manner. It appeared that again, no one in charge understood the plan – or even if there was one.

    But as bad as that disorganized exit was for the Americans, it was even worse for the people in South Vietnam who actually believed in America’s commitment to the country. Many of them had heard about North Vietnamese atrocities committed during the war. Many had actually worked out of the embassy or the CIA building as agents and/or informants. Yet now, with a collapse imminent, these people were mixed together with the tens of thousands who just wanted out before the fall. As CIA counter-intelligence analyst Frank Snepp later wrote, those people received no special consideration for their past work.

    Snepp was so angry at what had happened that he quit the Agency in 1976. He then decided to write a book about America’s disastrous exit. That book was called Decent Interval. From its title on down, the book was an eye-opener as to what had really happened from 1973-75, and what caused the ultimate American embarrassment, one that was, in large part, broadcast on television to millions of people at home.

    The power of Snepp’s book was in his insider knowledge of both the inner workings of the CIA station in Saigon, and the American embassy. This allowed Snepp to name names: CIA station chief Tom Polgar, CIA Director Bill Colby, American ambassador Graham Martin, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. And he laid bare their incredible lack of judgment in allowing what he considered a national disgrace to happen.

    But to Snepp, the ultimate betrayal went even further. First of all, neither the CIA nor the embassy had assembled lists of South Vietnamese who had helped America during the war. This would have been necessary in order to give them priority during the evacuation.

    What made that even worse was that the exit was done so willy-nilly that neither the embassy nor the CIA had completely shredded their intelligence files before the last helicopter left. Therefore, once the North Vietnamese army entered Saigon, those files could be retrieved, and with Russian or Chinese help, translated. From these translated files, whole networks of CIA informants and collaborators could be rebuilt, and a series of arrests made. Which is what happened.

    On the other hand, President Nguyen Van Thieu, who, as we shall see, bears much of the blame for the sudden rout, was treated quite differently. When he was ready to leave, a car arrived at his door. As it did so, a group of assistants appeared out of the nearby woods. They carried large luggage bags with them. When the escort offered his help, they refused. Once the car started on its way to the airport, one could hear the sounds of metal clanging against metal. Thieu was leaving with the last of South Vietnam’s gold bullion. He had gotten the bulk out earlier, and this was just small change. America’s anointed leader was allowed to loot its client state, while those further down the food chain were left for the re-education camps. This is how America said goodbye to South Vietnam: a country it had just about created in 1954.

    These events occurred mostly in March and April of 1975. It was part of the controversial, and now thoroughly exposed, “decent interval” strategy. This was the exit plan formulated by the foreign policy leaders of our nation in 1973. That is, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Nixon and Kissinger had been looking for a way to get out of Vietnam by either intimidating the North, or finding what they called “Peace with Honor”. When they discovered neither was possible, they decided on the 1973 Peace Accords, even though they themselves knew the accords would lead to a South Vietnamese defeat in anywhere from two to three years. But they felt that if the defeat occurred with Americans out of the war, and 24-36 months after the 1972 election, they would not be politically impacted by it. Thus originated the decent interval strategy, i.e., announce “Peace with Honor”, knowing that it was a mirage and Saigon had no way of winning once America was out. The evidence for this adduced by scholars like Ken Hughes and Jeff Kimball is overwhelming today. After promising Thieu we would not forsake him, Nixon and President Ford did just that. (See “Exposing Nixon’s Vietnam Lies”)

    Very few people seemed to realize what exactly Nixon and Kissinger had planned. That is, the 1973 Peace Accords that they so triumphantly announced prior to the 1972 presidential election was simply camouflage to disguise the inevitable American and South Vietnamese defeat. There was no way that Thieu’s army, the ARVN, could stave off defeat from the combined forces of the Viet Cong and the regular army of North Vietnam. But again, it’s hard to imagine that Nixon and Kissinger could have foreseen the disorganized rout that America’s last days in Vietnam became in 1975.

    Frank Snepp, who was stationed in Vietnam for the entire downfall, was one of the few who did realize what Nixon and Kissinger had done. Hence the title of his 1977 book. Since he knew the people involved and watched it all happen – he drove the car that got Thieu out of Saigon – he was able to name names and relate the actual events that caused the embarrassing mess it all ended up as. In other words, the book provided the back story to the pictures.

    CIA Director Stansfield Turner decided not to try and stop the book prior to its publication. He recalled what happened in the Pentagon Papers case. So the CIA sued Snepp afterwards on the basis that he had violated his non-disclosure agreement. The CIA won the case on the (humorous) grounds that the author had caused irreparable harm to national security. As a result, Snepp had to forfeit all royalties to the Agency, and clear any future books in advance with them.

    But the problem did not go away. Snepp’s book sold well. Plus, it was packed with information that showed just how badly the upper levels of government had performed during a crisis moment, one which it should have been well prepared to surmount. Other authors have since built on the exposure of this decent interval strategy. Documentary director Rory Kennedy decided she wanted to make a film about the decent interval concept after she saw how George W. Bush had ended American involvement in Iraq: that is, without a real exit strategy.

    Rory Kennedy made Snepp one of the main talking heads in her documentary film Last Days in Vietnam. This fascinating film has now come to Netflix, and is available on Amazon. When the film was originally released theatrically, it was attacked from both the right and left. The LA Times wanted to know if Kennedy – a child of Bobby Kennedy – thought her uncle would have withdrawn from Vietnam had he lived. The review in The Nation, by Nick Turse, wasn’t really a review. It was essentially a polemic against Kennedy for making a film that tried to find any heroism in the American effort in Vietnam. According to Turse, the war was too awful for that. Therefore the film was not worth discussing or analyzing.

    The problem with both of these approaches is that they violate the central function of criticism, which is to describe and illuminate the work in front of the reviewer. Rory Kennedy was not making a film about the Kennedy years in Vietnam. Neither was she making an overall examination of why America was there and what went wrong with the war effort. (The latter would take an extended series to even superficially explore.) Her subject is the last two years of American involvement in Vietnam. A time when, in fact, American soldiers were not involved in combat operations. They had left in 1973.

    To be sure, there are some problems with the film, and this review will discuss those faults. But they should be analyzed in the context of the documentary in front of us, not some non-existent film that the reviewer wishes had been made.

    Last Days in Vietnam begins with a brief flash forward to 1975. As we watch the aimless. confused, overpopulated streets of Saigon, we hear the voice of then Captain Stuart Herrington. He describes his predicament at that time: How to get men who had helped military intelligence out of Saigon before the city collapsed before the North Vietnamese onslaught.

    After setting this topic sentence, the film flashes backward. We now see a newsreel of President Nixon announcing the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords ending American combat involvement in Vietnam.

    Director Kennedy then introduces four of the main characters who will fill in the story line of her film. In addition to Herrington, we also see embassy guard Juan Valdez, Frank Snepp, and most importantly and intriguingly, Graham Martin, the last American ambassador in South Vietnam. This montage begins to describe the central problem the film will try to comprehend, namely: in addition to perhaps as many as 7,000 Americans still in country, there were well over a 100,000 Vietnamese who did not want to stay behind under a communist regime. Yet there was no formal evacuation plan presented by Martin, or announced by him – ever. This includes the last two days of the collapse.

    As she should, Kennedy spends some time on the enigma of Graham Martin (who died in 1990). Martin was a veteran State Department employee. He had served as ambassador to both Thailand and Italy before Nixon appointed him to head the Saigon embassy in 1973. For reasons stated above, Martin clearly carries a large part of the responsibility for this final American debacle in Vietnam. Some of those who knew him try and explain his inexplicable reluctance to prepare, announce and arrange the evacuation in various ways. He is described as a classic Cold Warrior, who also had lost a son in Vietnam. Therefore, he simply could not bring himself to admit that America had lost the war on his watch. Others say he completely overrated the power and dedication of the Army of South Vietnam (ARVN). Others try and explain it by saying he did not want to announce an evacuation because it may have caused a stampede. If the last was his reason, then his silence did little to ameliorate such a stampede. Martin comes across in this film as a man who never should have been in charge of the Saigon embassy. But further, under these circumstances, he should have been removed.

    The film then proceeds with Frank Snepp describing how flimsy the 1973 Paris Accords were. By 1974, when Nixon was forced to resign due to the Watergate scandal, Hanoi was encouraged to mount a major offensive, since they felt America was in a weak position to reply to it. As Snepp says, the 1973 accords were riddled with so many loopholes that there were dozens of violations. By late 1974, when the North Vietnamese decided to make their push, they had more than doubled the amount of troops they had in the south: from approximately 155,00 to around 370,000.

    Hence the North Vietnamese attack was already fairly successful at the outset. But it became even more successful when, in March of 1975, Thieu decided to abandon the Central Highlands area and ordered a disorganized retreat to defend the southernmost regions.

    Thieu made this even worse by changing his mind about the defense of the ancient city of Hue. He first said that he wanted to make a stand there. He then announced that it was not a priority. This caused a decline in morale of the ARVN, and the clogging of roads and highways by civilians caught headlong between the advancing army of North Vietnam and Thieu’s indecisiveness. The film does not mention Thieu’s reversals, but I think they would have helped explain the sudden rout, because all of this led to the disorganized spectacle that ended up taking place in Saigon on April 30, 1975, and which now included soldiers deserting from the ARVN. (Kennedy includes a memorable shot of a soldier extending outward from a raft to get on a boat and falling into the water.)

    As the retreat began to assume a momentum of its own, there were inevitable appeals to Washington for aid. These were directly presented by President Ford to Congress. Kennedy cuts here to interviews with GOP Representatives Pete McCloskey and the late Millicent Fenwick, to explain why these requests for aid were not honored. No one could accept spending hundreds of millions of dollars in 1975, when tens of billions had not done the job in the previous twenty years.

    I think the film missed another opportunity here. If Ford had presented a plan to just finance the evacuation itself, that would have been one thing. But the proposal for 722 million also included funds for renewed military operations. And that is what sunk it. Secondly, if Ford was really interested in an orderly evacuation, why could he have not scraped together the funds for that – which would have been much less than the amount he was asking – from other emergency accounts?

    The film now cuts back to Snepp. The CIA officer says that, from a reliable source, he found out that the target date for the taking of Saigon was early May. The idea was for the North Vietnamese army to celebrate Ho Chi Minh’s birthday in Saigon. In early April, with the ARVN in complete disarray, there were about 500,000 refugees crowding the highways south into Saigon; they were being followed by an army of about 140,000 regulars from North Vietnam. Even at this point, Martin denied to the press that Vietnam was now lost. Snepp tried to deal with Martin, so he could begin to face the facts of what to do about the impending collapse. Martin told Snepp he did not want to hear any more of this negative chatter.

    At this point in the film, Kennedy introduces her real topic, and her real theme. The former is the decision of certain people on the ground level to take matters into their own hands. Realizing that the upper echelons had committed a FUBAR of giant proportions, they decided to do whatever they could to help set things right, even though these attempts were in violation of accepted policy. In other words, the work done by men like Herrington to help South Vietnamese escape was done in the dark. The film actually uses the words “black operations” in regards to them. In fact, Martin began firing people when he heard the target was to get their allies in South Vietnam to Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

    An example would be Richard Armitage. Most people know Armitage as a State Department employee who – according to him – inadvertently leaked Valerie Plame’s name to reporter Robert Novak. Back then, Armitage was assigned as the Defense Attaché to the Saigon embassy. His last orders were to make sure that none of the many ships the USA had given to South Vietnam would fall into the hands of the enemy. His plan was to have them manned by their usual sailors, take them to a point in the South China Sea, evacuate the personnel, and then destroy them.

    But when Armitage went out to sea to count the ships, they had approximately 30,000 people on board. And they weren’t all navy ships. Some of them were fishing vessels. Aboard the USS Kirk, Armitage decided the only thing to do was to disobey orders and lead the flotilla over a thousand miles to Subic Bay in the Philippines.

    But to delineate further why this had to be done, it is important to note the appearance of Gerald Berry in the film. In 1975, Captain Berry was a helicopter pilot in the Marines. Whether or not he wanted to hear them, it was the military’s job to outline avenues of evacuation to Martin. Berry and his colleagues put together four different options for the ambassador to choose from. The first was to float the mass of people down the Saigon River to the docks near the Pacific Ocean. The second was to use commercial aircraft at Tan Son Nhut airport to fly out the mass of refugees through the main air base outside of Saigon. The third option was to use the same airport, but in this case, to mobilize a fleet of military aircraft for the evacuation.

    The final option, and the one Berry only offered to Graham as a last resort, was a helicopter evacuation. Berry noted two serious shortcomings with this alternative: 1) Helicopters could only handle small amounts of people per flight; 2) Choppers were much slower than fixed wing aircraft, thus requiring many more sorties to ferry everyone out.

    Martin’s intransigence forced Berry to utilize the last option. As the film explains, option (1) had to be prepared in advance, since it was a long haul floating tens of thousands of people down the river. Options (2) and (3) were also wiped out by the ambassador’s delays. Because Martin waited so long to begin his impromptu escape, the North Vietnamese were on the outskirts of Saigon. Realizing what the best exit strategy was, they began to bombard Tan Son Nhut airport with artillery and rockets. Therefore, out of necessity, the Marines used the helicopter option. Berry himself flew an amazing 34 sorties in a bit over 18 hours. His last flight got Martin out. He asked for more pilots to prepare a rest rotation. That request was denied.

    But there were so many helicopter flights coming in that they would back up into each other. As Snepp notes, the security guards had to cut down a tree in the compound to make way for another helipad. What further made it all so difficult was that the ships used to land on were not aircraft carriers. Some, like the Kirk, were destroyers, whose space for landing was very limited and which could only handle medium sized choppers. This explains one of the most memorable images from the evacuation. Because of the limited space, and the number of flights, at times it became necessary to simply push a helicopter off the deck into the sea so another one could land. As we see in the film, this did not happen just once. It happened three times.

    This directly relates to one of the high points of this riveting film. A South Vietnamese pilot was using a Chinook helicopter to get his brother and his family out of Saigon. But the ship he was trying to land on could not accommodate a Chinook, which is a twin engine, long, troop transport type of chopper. So the sailors on board came out on deck and yelled at him, waving him off. Since he was low on fuel and had nowhere to go, he decided to hover over the deck. He then began dropping his family members to the sailors below. This included little children who were actually caught in the air. When the pilot was the only one left, he flew the chopper out about 25 feet away from the ship. He stayed at the controls as he began to strip out of his flight suit. (As one American sailor says on screen, he still doesn’t know how the heck he did that.) Once he was out of his suit he then ditched the chopper into the water, jumped out, and swam to the ship. This gripping sequence is not described. It is shown.

    This is a good point to accent just how well made this documentary is. It is very clear that the producers of the picture really went through just about every bit of film they could find on the subject. It is that complete. But beyond that, it is what they have done with this footage that makes the film so remarkable to see. For many decades, and in many schools, documentaries were simply that: a recorded film of an event. One plopped down the camera in front of, say, a parade, and that was it. There were exceptions, of course; e.g., Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad and Triumph of the Will. But, by and large, most documentaries did not use the techniques available to film to add to or alter what we saw on screen.

    With the introduction of modern technology, including CGI, that has changed today. This film uses digital imaging very well to illustrate things like escape routes out of Saigon to the airport, or to the docks. In one particularly telling image, Kennedy irises into the airport digital image – that is, she encloses it with a narrow circle effect – but then explodes the circle into the live action of the North Vietnamese bombing. She also uses the device of cross-cutting between films and photos adroitly. And she also uses the photographic effect of zooming in on a still photograph to accent a person in it. In one case, it is Martin, and the device accents his isolation from circumstances. The editing by Don Kleszy is also very skillful. In his montages of crowd confusion, it is notable how he cuts between one shot of people running in one direction, and the next shot of people running the opposite way, thus capturing the chaos and confusion of those final days.

    But amid the good things in this film, I would be remiss if I did not note a serious flaw. Namely, the presence of Henry Kissinger. To put it simply: No film made by any member of the Kennedy family should have Kissinger in it. Especially a film that deals with Vietnam. As time goes on, and more documents are declassified, the better President Kennedy looks, and the worse Nixon, Ford and Kissinger look. We now understand better why Kissinger never advanced in the Kennedy White House, but rose to the top under Nixon and Ford. Today, Kissinger stands exposed as one of the worst foreign policy practitioners in recent memory. From Vietnam, to Cambodia, to the Middle East, to the Pakistan/India dispute, the Kissinger/Nixon policies all proved disastrously wrong. It was only through their manipulation of the press that their failures had been disguised, e.g., as in the Kalb brothers’ fawning 1974 biography. Today, most authorities agree that the Nixon-Kissinger years are more aptly characterized in William Bundy’s 1998 volume A Tangled Web. That coruscating study was so pungent that Kissinger himself replied to a positive review of it in The New York Review of Books (see here).

    Near the beginning of the film, Kissinger actually states that, with the 1973 Peace Accords, he and Nixon were attempting to achieve a co-existence between North and South Vietnam, somewhat like that between North and South Korea.

    This is completely wrong. And Ken Hughes demonstrates its falsity in his book Fatal Politics. He does it with transcribed tapes from the Nixon library. Hughes shows that Kissinger, in his own words, never believed for a moment that the cease-fire of 1973 would hold, or that Hanoi would have any real problem in conquering the south.

    This leads to another false statement that Kissinger makes in the film. He says that the USA had three goals in the final days: to get as many people out as possible, to ensure that South Vietnam was not stabbed in the back, and to preserve the honor of America. This statement is not just flatulent, it is incomprehensible.

    As the film shows, if the objective was to get out as many as possible, the official US effort was a complete and utter failure. And Kissinger, as Secretary of State, carries a lot of the blame for that. Tens of thousands were evacuated not because of what he did, but in spite of it. And this film honors those who were actually responsible.

    As per stabbing South Vietnam in the back, again, the work of authors like Ken Hughes and Jeffrey Kimball belies that. As does the title of Snepp’s book. Kissinger and Nixon’s cease-fire was a device to delay the fall of South Vietnam until after the 1972 election when, the two felt, most people would have forgotten about the subject. One can also look at Jerrold L. Schecter’s 1986 book, The Palace File, which contains a series of 31 letters from Presidents Nixon and Ford to Thieu. In those letters, among other things, Ford and Nixon promised South Vietnam full diplomatic and military support, before and after the signing of the peace accords. Needless to say, the support never materialized.

    The film includes another false statement by Kissinger. Ford’s White House – with Kissinger on stage during the press conference – made a premature announcement that all the Americans who wanted to leave Saigon, were now out. This was not true. The final platoon of security guards had not left the embassy at that time. The film shows the platoon leader recalling his problem during departure: he kept on counting the men who should have been there. He was one short. He would not leave anyone behind. The last man was Valdez, who we saw at the beginning. He was pulled onto the helicopter by those on board, and the film contains a photo of him after he was just inside the open tailgate. After Kissinger’s false statement, this is a nice thematic closing to the film.

    Kissinger’s presence here, and his continuing duplicity, mar the sterling work Rory Kennedy has done. She has assembled a finely textured, intricately planned salute to those in the lower ranks. Those who had to live with the horrible mistakes people like Henry Kissinger made.

    Except they decided not to live with them. They did something about it. And they succeeded in spite of the huge odds arrayed against them.

    Overall, the Vietnam War was, at first , a huge mistake. It then became a terrible epic tragedy. For both the USA and Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger senselessly expanded that tragedy into Cambodia. The whole time, both men knew that – as they were dropping thousands of tons of bombs over Indochina – America could not win the war.

    They then decided on their “decent interval” masquerade: The war would not actually be lost by America, but by a combination of Thieu’s incompetence and a lack of support by Congress. This was nothing but an empty, and terribly destructive, charade. And Kissinger was a major part of it. In fact, as Ken Hughes shows, he essentially pushed Nixon into it.

    It would have been nice to see a film about that. Just as it would be nice to see a film about the difference between President Kennedy’s strategy on Vietnam, and those who followed him in the White House. A film on the latter could have shown why Kissinger did not advance under Kennedy, but rose to the top under Nixon and Ford.

    After this, maybe Rory Kennedy will make a film with that kind of epic scope. But for now, she has decided to do a well wrought, smaller piece of chamber music. James Joyce once gave his hero , Stephen Dedalus the memorable line, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” This film tells the story of how part of that Vietnam nightmare was constructed. And it chronicles the efforts of those who did what they could to try and correct that nightmare.

  • The Good Shepherd

    Watching Robert DeNiro, Angelina Jolie, and Matt Damon discuss The Good Shepherd with Charlie Rose was an interesting experience. They were saying things like:

    “So many good people involved. ”

    “It’s why you want to be in the film business. ”

    “Everybody loved the script. ”

    “Such an interesting story. ”

    The banality of these answers was equaled by the banality of the questions. Rose even tried to relate the film to The Departed, something I still don’t understand. But there was one important point that surfaced. DeNiro had tried to get the film made for eight years. So clearly it was close to him personally. Second, DeNiro apparently liked the script by Eric Roth a lot. I will return to this later since I think Roth and his script are a real problem. In fact, the root of the problem.

    The Good Shepherd was subtitled in its trailer, “The Untold Story of the Birth of the CIA.” This is a real misnomer, since most of the “untold” actual events are immediately recognizable to anyone who has a cursory knowledge of the history of the CIA. In another sense the subtitle is true since the story it tells is very liberally fictionalized. In that sense, it is untold. The main character in the film, Edward Wilson is based upon legendary counter-intelligence chief James Angleton. And there are other characters that are clearly based on CIA luminaries. DeNiro plays a man named William Sullivan who is based on OSS chief William Donovan. William Hurt plays someone named William Arlen, which suggests Allen Dulles. There are two Russian defectors in the film also. One, who Wilson befriends, suggests Anatoly Golitsin. A second one, who Wilson disbelieves, is modeled on Yuri Nosenko. And as in the Nosenko story, we see the CIA handlers torture the second defector on Angleton/Wilson’s orders. This sequence ends with screenwriter Roth borrowing the denouement of another CIA episode. The handlers inject the defector with LSD (why they do is very weakly explained) and he suddenly turns and jumps out the hotel window to his death. This actually happened during the MK/Ultra program with unwitting subject Frank Olson.

    The story follows Wilson from his college days at Yale to his recruitment into the CIA by Sullivan. We then watch him on some of his and his cohorts’ assignments in places like West Germany and South America. These are done in flashbacks, and the recurring present “frame” of the story is the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle. Wilson is charged with investigating “leaks” about that operation. The trail ends up fingering a family member who the KGB has bugged. This leads to a personal tragedy for Wilson and his family: his marriage falls apart; his son’s fiancée is killed. But he gets a higher position at the CIA’s new building, which went up near the end of the Kennedy presidency. The film ends with him walking through the new wing to his new office.

    What Roth has done with this story is not just a mutation of the facts. Its one thing to make up a fiction, like say John Le Carre does, based on experiences, which are intrinsically interesting and also dramatic in personal terms. It is something else to seriously alter real events and actually make them less interesting than they are. And to rely on cheap devices to create drama. For instance, the climactic personal drama in the piece comes from Wilson’s son overhearing a conversation while in the shower through an open door. Roth uses the whole open door motif throughout the film. We are to believe that when someone like Donovan/Sullivan comes to see him Wilson would leave the door to his den open so anyone could overhear. In other words, if the doors would have been shut, as they should have, the film would have no climax. Another Rothian touch: he uses a deaf girl that Wilson liked in college to humanize the rather inscrutable character. They go to bed as youths, but she can’t go through with it. Many years later, they see each other at the theater, a production of Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard. Moments later they are in a bar together. Moments after that, they leave the bar together, presumably never to see each other again. But wait: Roth summons Movieland. She steps out of the taxi she was in, they stare at each other, and Presto! They are in a hotel bed together, except this time, they go all the way. Later, Wilson’s wife Clover (Angelina Jolie) gets photos of this rendezvous. She confronts Wilson with them in public and creates a huge scene at a Christmas party. (Who took the photos, how and why, are never made clear. )

    What Roth does with the Bay of Pigs episode is also done for the purposes of making personal drama. He postulates that the Cubans knew the landing site in advance. In no book or report that I have read is this stated. In fact, the best report I know, the one by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, states that Castro knew an invasion was imminent because of the CIA leafleting and supply drops made by air in the weeks prior to the landing. So he put his huge militia of over 200,000 men on alert. When the invasion came it was quite noisy and it alerted a regular army detail near the scene. They in turn called out the nearby militia and enough troops and armor got to the front to prevent a beachhead from being established.

    This in turn relates to another point of CIA mythology that Roth uses. He states that Kennedy’s canceling of the so-called “second” air strike doomed the operation. This canard, repeated by such military pedant types as Alexander Haig, has been refuted by Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. He told author Noel Twyman that the second strike was not in the original plans, which Allen Dulles would not leave for JFK to study. That the CIA came back to them, after the invasion was in operation, and requested the second strike. Further, as Kirkpatrick notes, what difference would it have made if the second strike had taken place?The bottom line was that you had a weakly supplied invasion force of 1,500 men against a strongly supplied army and militia of over 225, 000 men. When looked at in this way, one sees why Dulles would not leave the plans with JFK. Under scrutiny it would have become clear that the mission could not succeed as planned. In actuality, the Agency had banked on Kennedy caving as the invasion faltered. That he would then order an American invasion of the island to save face. Which he didn’t. He couldn’t, because as the film shows, about seven days prior he had told a press conference American troops would not invade Cuba. Further, near the end of the film, when the Dulles character is fired, it’s because of embezzling funds. In reality, he was terminated because JFK realized he had been duped about the operation.

    All of the above seems to me to be more interesting than what Roth has reduced it to. And in his direction DeNiro does not mitigate much of the heavy handedness. We see Wilson trying to decipher a photo of the man suspected of leaking the invasion. We suspect early that the reason we cannot see the man is because it must be someone close to the protagonist. When Wilson finally realizes the actual location where the leak took place, he personally flies to the location alone. So now we know it must be someone close to him since men in that position in the CIA usually don’t go to far off exotic places themselves. Early on, after Wilson contacts an old college professor in England, he is asked to get the undercover operative to leave the spy service. He must do this by asking the old man to tie his shoe in view of other spies. Which he does. But that’s not enough for Roth. Even after we see this, the Kim Philby type running the operation has the old man killed by drowning him in a river down the street. First we hear the screams, which rise in volume. Then Wilson walks down the street to see the splashing of the old man who is already underwater. Then we watch as his cane slowly disappears beneath the surface and the water subsides. The Philby type says to Wilson, “He knew too much. ” Roth doesn’t have Wilson ask the obvious: “Then why did you have him go through the whole charade of tying my shoe?”This whole scene was done with all the subtlety of DeNiro’s pal Martin Scorsese.

    And that’s a problem with this enterprise. A friend offers his hand to Wilson before going on a CIA operation at a coffee plantation in South America, Wilson tells him he should not be wearing his school ring down there. DeNiro makes sure we see the ring. We then watch the operation go awry. Cut to Wilson in his office and a coffee can arrives on his desk. His assistant then laboriously goes through the process of peeling it open. I’d say half the audience understood what would be inside. But DeNiro shows us a close-up of the severed finger. I won’t even go into the ending. I will only say that I think everyone understood what would happen to the son’s fiancée at least three minutes before it occurred. Eric Roth telegraphs better than the old Western Union. And DeNiro does nothing to lessen his telegraphic powers.

    The really surprising thing about the film is not Roth’s dull script. Since this is the guy who helped bring us things like Ali and Munich, I knew what to expect. The surprise is that DeNiro has directed a cast that is, to be kind, unexceptional. Angelina Jolie brings nothing new or original to a part that has her light and cheery at the beginning, and frustrated and sad at the end. The usually pallid William Hurt is palled again as the Dulles figure. DeNiro himself play the Donovan character as a kind of avuncular long lost relative. He has none of the force, drive, or scalpel mind Donovan had. But the real failure in the cast is Matt Damon as Wilson/Angleton. When Damon has to go out and get a role, as in Good Will Hunting, he does alright. But here, the role is one that is almost completely interior. Most of it takes place as they say, “between the ears”. It’s the kind of acting that is difficult, unappreciated, and rarely attempted by a star since it is completely devoid of glamour and personal appeal. Damon is not up to it. He doesn’t have the kind of subtle imagination and immense concentration a role like this requires. His facial pattern of inquiry and response are neither clear nor interesting. Instead of negating oneself in order to create another, what Damon has done is just the negation part. (If you want to see how an actor can do this kind of role, see Russell Crowe in The Insider, or a much younger DeNiro in The Last Tycoon. )

    The worst part of this disappointment is that there is more to come. DeNiro has said that he made a deal with Roth. He would act and direct in Roth’s script while Roth wrote another one about a similar espionage scene, except more modern. After this, I’m not looking forward to it. If you need to jazz up the Bay of Pigs and still turn it to dross, I’d hate to see what happens with, say, Aldrich Ames. Meanwhile, to see how this kind of story is really done, and done exceptionally well, rent the DVD of Richard Burton’s classic, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Its something Eric Roth could never come close to.

  • Oliver Stone vs. The Historical Establishment

    From the July-August 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5) of Probe

    Nearly a decade later, the vibrations and echoes of Oliver Stone’s film on the Kennedy assassination are still being heard and felt. When JFK first came out in late 1991, the media had prepared the public with a six-month propaganda barrage to doubt the factual accuracy of the film. That barrage began in both the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post with articles by Jon Margolis and George Lardner respectively. The attacks on the film kept up throughout its tenure in the theaters and into the Academy Awards ceremonies where, as researcher Richard Goad revealed, David Belin took out an ad in Variety to deliberately hurt the film’s chances at Oscar time. Looked at in retrospect, this campaign was clearly unprecedented in the history of movies. And Stone himself has admitted that the first attacks totally surprised him. Perhaps they should not have. In his film, Stone took up two issues that the establishment media does not wish to be touched upon in any serious or truthful way, i.e. the Kennedy assassination, and the investigation into that murder by the late Jim Garrison, District Attorney of New Orleans who, four years later, launched the only criminal prosecution ever into the murder of President Kennedy. Stone’s film advocated a conspiracy, and a high level one, into the JFK murder. His film portrayed Jim Garrison and his inquiry in a favorable light. Therefore, the big guns of the media pummeled him for months. The barrage was designed to assassinate both Stone, and the film’s message. The week the film opened both Time and Newsweek featured the film as a major story, the latter placed it on the cover. The idea was to massage the collective public mentality into not accepting the film’s message, or at least to create doubts about both the message and the messenger. Many people in the general public, although convinced the official story was not correct, had doubts about the film’s accuracy and total content.

    The debate over Stone’s film went on for about a year in public. Not everything about it was negative. There were many programs on television that featured a measured debate about the facts of the film and the case in a careful and balanced way. Unfortunately, these programs were not the widely seen ones like a 48 Hours Dan Rather special, which was an awful one-sided attack on Stone and the critics. The following year, in 1993, the media brought out its savior. In the year of the 30th anniversary of the JFK assassination, Gerald Posner jumped out at the public on the newsstands and their TV sets. The man became the darling of the media. It didn’t matter that his book was unbelievably shallow, and in some cases absolutely ersatz. Posner can be considered the second wave of the propaganda blitz against Oliver Stone and his heretic film. Another attempt at playing to the crowd, creating seeds of doubt about Stone and his movie. Posner’s appearance also signaled the beginning of the simplistic, cheap labeling of Stone and his companions as the “conspiracy cabal.” On national television, Posner called Stone’s scenario the “everything but the kitchen sink theory” to the JFK assassination. Thus began the canard that Stone’s movie postulated a conspiracy to kill Kennedy that included the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the Mob, the Pentagon, Lyndon Johnson etc. This, of course, is a wild exaggeration of what the movie actually says, but it tells us a lot about what Posner’s mission was and what his devotion to the truth really consisted of. Ever since, Stone and the critics have been saddled with the rubric that they are paranoid fantasists who see conspiracies in every major crime ever committed. Or when used even more cheaply by people like Noam Chomsky, the critics can be grouped with those who believe in space aliens and Elvis sightings.

    Now comes the third wave. This one is for posterity. As the mass media continues to grow in size, concentration, and power, its outreach into the academic establishment has slowly become more marked. That is, the number of academics and/or historians featured on television has gotten more select and familiar. Also, the publishing industry has gotten to be monopolized also. Today, according to Publisher’s Weekly, approximately 70% of all new books are published by ten houses. This is an amazing shrinkage of the number of outlets and a great increase in control of the number of publishers who can give a book a serious launch in the marketplace. In fact, the original publisher of Jim Garrison’s original hardcover book which Stone based his film on, no longer exists.

    The above information is a way of explaining the response of the historical and academic establishment to Stone and his films. For the debate about those subjects has now reached into that arena. For not only the media, but also academia has generally bought into the Warren Commission myth about the lone gunman scenario as a solution to the Kennedy assassination. There are very few textbooks or historical books in general which give a balanced view of any of the assassinations of the sixties. And most “talking head” historians who pop up on television won’t delve into any conspiracy scenarios in any of these historically significant murders, e.g. David Garrow on the Martin Luther King case. What this says about America is that the rather unexamined world of academia can be seen to serve as an adjunct to the Establishment. Any cursory examination of the rosters of organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations will show a large amount of memberships devoted to two rather surprising institutions: the media and academia.

    As both Michael Kurtz and Robert Toplin write in an interesting new book, Stone lobbed a bomb at this establishment. And it has had an extraordinarily long reaction time. Toplin has edited a new book of essays on both Stone and his films entitled Oliver Stone’s USA. In it nine of his films are examined. Also, Toplin has allowed Stone to respond to the critiques in three long sections. The book is well worth reading for both the controversy and some new information it contains. For example, how many readers knew that Stone was born and raised a conservative Republican and that he backed Barry Goldwater in 1964. Also, Stone reveals here that his proposed film on Martin Luther King was turned down by the studios based in part on the criticism it got in the press when word of the proposal leaked out.

    The general plan of the book is to introduce the topic of Stone’s historical films in general first. So the first part of the book features overviews of Stone and his films by Robert Toplin, Robert Rosenstone, and a co-authored essay by Randy Roberts and David Welky. Stone then responds to these three essays on his image. In the second part of the book, there are nine essays on individual films: Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, Nixon. The final section of the book gives Stone an opportunity to respond to these critiques which he does in two parts. The first one is entitled “On Seven Films” and the last essay is devoted to the two most controversial, JFK and Nixon.

    Before getting on to a discussion of the book, let me make a few cogent points first. The entire discipline of history is under debate itself. This debate is raging in the confines of those ivory towers today. That debate is going on with two issues. First, on methodology. Up until this century, most historians believed in the, let’s call it, top-down method of historical reportage. That is, if you told the story of an epoch with what happened at the top levels – presidents, governors, the rich etc. – that would neatly sum up an era and tell you the important events which occurred. With the advent of the so-called New History of the 1950’s, that has changed. Many younger historians are trying to be sociologists too in order to try and depict what life was like for the average American. To bring about that more inclusive picture, the historian has had to avail himself of more tools also. He has had to delve into economics, demographics, statistics etc. And with this new digging has come a second debate: synthesizers versus data-crunchers. Or, is it more important to tell what you can with a limited amount of material or is crucial to concentrate on a small area and dump out every last drop of data you can possibly muster. Some argue for the former by saying that history without any trends or curves becomes formless, meaningless. Historians who side with the latter group say that it is of utmost importance to marshal as many relevant facts as possible before denoting a curve or trend. At the same time these debates are going on, the debate over whether or not history should be studied as an undergraduate requirement at all is also ongoing.

    This is the background that Stone lobbed his bomb into. And with it, whether he knew it or not, he was entering the above debate. Stone clearly entered on the side of the data-collectors against the synthesizers. Few aspects of American history had been so generalized about – erroneously – as the JFK murder. In fact, as many have stated, it is an absolute disgrace what the historians have done with this crucial event. When the debate was raging in the media, Stone would always argue that the problem with the JFK murder is that no one wants to argue the evidence. Which was true since very few journalists or historians had looked at it. That is probably even more true today since the Assassination Records Review Board has now declassified millions of pages of new documents which have been relatively ignored by the press. Nearly all of this new material backs up the contentions of Stone’s film. And in this new book, the only discussion of this new record is by Stone and Professor Michael Kurtz. Clearly, by getting the Review Board created Stone was trying to do the work that historians have always complained about, solving the problem of declassification.

    By making more records available, the historian can now be more accurate in his judgments about the Kennedy assassination. Unfortunately, to be kind, and with the exceptions noted above, that does not happen here. In theory, facts are supposed to be like sunshine, the more there are the brighter the picture. Yet it tells us something about the Kennedy assassination when most of these historians continue to work in the dark.

    Finally, there is one other historical notion that needs to be addressed as background and that is the so-called “mystique of conspiracy”. Excepting for the rare luminary like Carroll Quigley of Georgetown – Bill Clinton’s favorite professor – very few illustrious historians have dealt with the question of conspiracy in history. For instance, even where conspiracy is an accomplished fact e.g. the Lincoln assassination, few mainstream historians address that important event with honesty or thoroughness. In fact, many ignore it completely. So even before Oliver Stone got labeled a conspiracy nut, the academic community was predisposed against him. Of course, if one grants the omnipresence of conspiracies in American history, one could not synthesize very easily at all. One would have to explain deep, dark forces lurking in the shadows which every so often sprung forward and captured an important moment for its own purpose. It would take a lot of work and effort to thoroughly explain these phenomena. It would also then ipso facto be a confession that much of what had been written previously in both the media and in history books about certain events was wrong. This was another bomb lobbed by Stone at the cozy nest of historians’ societies.

    Having said all of this, I think Stone was treated fairly well in this book. The very fact that the editor, Toplin, allowed him ample room to respond is evidence of that. Also, some of the discussions of Stone’s films are appreciative. For example, the esteemed Walter LaFeber – who has written the best overview of American foreign policy in Central America – does a fair and informative job on Stone’s Salvador. David Halberstam is enthusiastic about Platoon. Toplin even let the writer of the book Heaven and Earth do the discussion of that film. David Courtwright writes an interesting essay on that fascinating, extraordinary, towering film Natural Born Killers, perhaps the finest satirical look at a serious American subject since Stanley Kubrick’s great Dr. Strangelove. There is an essay by Randy Roberts and David Welky entitled “A Sacred Mission: Oliver Stone and Vietnam” which is quite interesting. In it, the authors trace Stone’s childhood and young adulthood and seemingly try to portray him as some kind of malcontent. They then describe his tours of duty in Vietnam and his early attempts at getting Platoon made. They then discuss Born of the Fourth of July and Heaven and Earth then conclude with a discussion of JFK focusing on the film’s thesis of Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam. They cogently write, “JFK was a mortar lobbed at the establishment, and it set off a firestorm of controversy.” They then add that the thesis, Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam, “though passionately and eloquently argued … does not stand up to scrutiny.” They argue the rather ancient banality that there was no real difference between NSAMs 263 and 273 and that 263 was only meant as a warning to President Ngo Dinh Diem to shape up and allow for more democracy in South Vietnam or Kennedy would weaken U.S. commitment. This brings one of the issues about the historical debate mentioned above into the forefront. If one is supposed to be writing a scholarly and serious review of a controversial artist and his films for the purpose of examining the historical record he has highlighted, one would think that the writers would acquaint themselves with the latest declassified records on the subject. The documents that the Review Board has declassified on this subject are now definitive. Just two issues ago in this publication, I discussed at length the record of the May, 1963 SECDEF Conference in Hawaii. That record seems to me as definitive as one can get about this subject and it is absolutely clear on this point. (The Review Board tried to get the record of the November, 1963 Honolulu conference, which would have been just as valuable if not more so, but they could not.) So, on this issue, Stone actually comes out looking better than the supposed scholars.

    But, of course, for our audience and this publication, the discussions of JFK and Nixon must take center stage. As they do in the book. Michael Kurtz wrote the discussion of the former film. There are three critiques of the latter. They are by Stephen Ambrose, George McGovern, and Arthur Schlesinger. In a separate concluding section, Stone takes almost 50 pages to respond to these writers. Michael Kurtz is one of the few historians who has actually studied the JFK assassination and he has published a decent book on the subject, Crime of the Century. Kurtz notes the storm of controversy Stone’s film provoked and he adds that many commentators had no qualifications to discuss the Kennedy murder. Which is correct. But yet, Kurtz then seems to repeat the Vietnam canard when he writes that Stone remains vulnerable to criticism on the thesis that “an unidentified cabal of military-industrial-intelligence movers and shakers ordered Kennedy’s assassination because he intended to withdraw all American troops from Vietnam.” Kurtz may be right about the first part of the dual-edged sentence – the identity of the conspirators – but on the withdrawal part Stone was right on. On this part of the film, Kurtz attaches another familiar distortion that the “film intimates that [Lyndon] Johnson himself was in on the plot to kill the president.” Only if one is not watching too closely.

    Kurtz has never been a fan of Jim Garrison, and he continues his attack in this volume. Like most Garrison-bashers, Kurtz deflates the DA at the same time he exonerates Clay Shaw. But Kurtz goes further. He writes, “The movie’s implication that Shaw indeed participated in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy simply has no substantial evidence to support it.” Kurtz now seems to be going beyond the confines of the film into the newly declassified record. There have been thousands of pages of new documents pertaining to Shaw that the Review Board has released. Much of that record has been put together into an invaluable book by Bill Davy, Let Justice Be Done. Kurtz knows of the book since he mentions it in his footnotes (along with my book which he mistitles). Whether he read it is another matter of course. But if he did, he must discount the information in it since Davy makes a fine case for Shaw’s complicity in the New Orleans part of the conspiracy. Also, Kurtz says that Stone “branded” Shaw a CIA-collaborator when Davy has now unearthed documents which clinch the idea that he was much more than that.

    Kurtz also states that Stone’s portrayal of JFK himself is too one-sided and saintly. Granted that Stone’s portrait of Kennedy is not full dimensional, but he is not a main character in the story. He is only referred to. As the editors of this journal have mentioned, we realize the legion of Kennedy bashers out there and between the bashers and Oliver Stone’s version, we think Stone’s is closer to the truth. Also, Kurtz faults Stone for presenting the conspiracy-side of the debate only and not giving the Warren Commission defenders their due. This is silly. How can one make a film of the Garrison story without accenting the DA’s beliefs first? Also, the Warren Commission defenders have their way all the time in the mainstream press (and thanks to people like Alec Cockburn, in the alternative press too). Why not give the critics a well-deserved platform? Also, Kurtz states that no witness who heard shots from the Texas School Book Depository is portrayed, yet there is a witness who points there early in the film.

    Kurtz is the only writer in the volume to give any attention to the discoveries made by the Review Board. Yet, he states that no smoking gun has emerged from these records. This is a matter of interpretation and we beg to disagree. There is a lot in the medical investigation by former Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn that can be classified as such. Also, Noel Twyman’s book shows that there is powerful evidence that the Dallas Police only found two shells at the crime scene and not three. That is a smoking gun if true.

    Kurtz does make some nice comments about the film. He writes that, in the field of historical drama, only Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has had a greater impact on the public imagination. And he concludes with the following statement, “For all of JFK’s faults and shortcomings, few producers and directors can claim such an impact from their movies, and few historians can claim such an impact from their works.” Yet at the beginning of the essay, he states that Oliver Stone “crossed the line between artist and scholar by combining film with history, by projecting onto the silver screen his highly subjective version of actual persons and events … ” Kurtz would have been on safer ground if he would have added that all artists do this when depicting an historical event. From Sergei Eisenstein in Potemkin to Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde to Brian dePalma in The Untouchables to James Cameron in Titanic artists take liberties with the documentary record. This is called dramatic license. Yet none of these directors was attacked with anywhere near the force that Stone was. As we know, historians and investigators also do the same or academics and journalists would not have backed that great piece of dramatic fiction called the Warren Commission Report. Since Stone is an artist working in a tradition, his liberties are much more excusable than a team of professional investigators supposedly searching without restraint for the truth to be presented as such to the American public. No writer in this volume brought out this important point.

    The two other essays which will be of most interest to our readers are those by Stephen Ambrose and Arthur Schlesinger. Ambrose is the current conservative anchorman for the academic and journalistic establishment. Schlesinger is his liberal counterpart. It is not odd that both agree on the subject of Stone and his two films JFK and Nixon. Ambrose is slightly more virulent than Schlesinger, although not by much. In his opening crescendo words like “fraudulent” and “lies” spill off his pen easily. He even discounts the fact that in Nixon, Stone prefaced the film with a disclaimer which noted that some scenes were “conjectured”. What more clear device could Stone use to show that he was using dramatic license? Yet Ambrose ignores this issue almost completely and hones in on Stone because he is not “factually accurate” throughout. What is surprising about Ambrose is that he then begins his assault on the film with issues that most would consider minor and arguable. Namely the depiction of Nixon as a drinker and pill-popper during the height of the Watergate crisis. The problem with this assault, as even Bob Woodward noted to Ambrose long ago, is that Stone can mount evidence for it from Nixon’s own camp. For instance, in his memoir about his years with Nixon, John Ehrlichman noted that Nixon had a drinking problem in two senses. First he liked the stuff and second, he could not handle it. Before he agreed to work on his campaign, he made Nixon promise to lay off the booze. So to say that Nixon would relapse into an old bad habit under the tremendous pressures of Watergate is eminently probable. As to the pills, in their book The Final Days, Woodward and Carl Bernstein interviewed Alexander Haig, Nixon’s Chief of Staff during Watergate. He told them, during Watergate, he was so worried about Nixon’s mental balance that he gave orders to clear the White House of pills and other things that Nixon could use in a potentially rash act. Again Woodward reminded Ambrose of this fact on national television and asked why such an order would be given if the pills were not there. Ambrose either forgot the exchange or ignored it.

    From here, Ambrose moves on to another rather mild and arguable point: Nixon’s use of profanity. When the film first broke, Ambrose tried to argue that the whole issue of profanity was exaggerated and abused by the film. He was reminded that if that was so, then why were so many words deleted from the Watergate tapes under the rubric of “expletive deleted”? Furthermore, Stanley Kutler’s book Abuse of Power, featuring more declassified tapes, shows this point in more detail. It also shows that Nixon had a penchant for using ethnic slurs. So today Ambrose has resorted to the fallback position of arguing exactly what words Nixon used in his swearing. He also argues that whatever the profanities, they were the same or less than other presidents like Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. As anyone who has read the Kennedy transcripts knows, he is wrong on at least that president.

    Ambrose then admits that these might be minor character points. He calls them peccadilloes. He quickly adds that: “The central piece of fiction is not. It is the creation of a Nixon-Fidel Castro-Kennedy connection. Stone has Nixon involved in a CIA assassination plot against Castro, which somehow played a part in the Kennedy assassination and left Nixon with a terrible secret and guilt about Kennedy’s death.” Ambrose then goes on to argue against almost every contention Stone makes in postulating this scenario. To do so, he ignores, discounts, or misreports evidence. And, of course, he allows for no extension for what has not been revealed yet.

    First, let us note the jumping off point for this thesis and Ambrose’s disagreement. It is the Bay of Pigs operation. Today, with the release of two important reports by the Assassination Records Review Board and other organizations, it can now be stated with certainty that almost every examination of that operation has been incomplete. It can now be stated that at least part of the agenda for the Bay of Pigs was hidden or, at least, not written down. John Newman’s upcoming book, Kennedy and Cuba, will be the most accurate portrait to date on the subject. It will make all previous depictions obsolete and from what Newman has told me it will make all of Ambrose’s writing on the subject seem elementary at best and will do a lot to bolster Stone. Richard Bissell himself, who commanded the operation at CIA, admitted that assassination had been a part of the operation. Howard Hunt has written that Nixon was the officer in charge at the White House. The operation was planned during the Eisenhower administration (and Newman’s work will show that a similar operation was tried at that time). Newman’s previous work has shown that it was Nixon himself who suggested the use of the Mob as agents for the CIA in the Castro murder plots. And when Ambrose writes that no attempts were made on Castro during Eisenhower’s tenure, he is artfully phrasing a nebulous point. Because the CIA report on those Castro murder attempts shows that they began at least in August of 1960 and probably before then. As for actual “attempts” that is something that can never be fully shown. For example, the CIA says they made eight attempts on Castro’s life. Castro’s security forces say it is much higher than that.

    But to continue with the main point of Stone’s credibility and Ambrose’s scholarship, the above mentioned declassified CIA reports on both the Bay of Pigs and the Castro plots reveal that Kennedy was deliberately kept in the dark about both the plots and large parts of the invasion plan. Is it a coincidence that both were in operation at the same time during Eisenhower’s administration and that both went into a kind of remission during JFK’s administration? Bissell admitted in the 1980’s that he had hoped that the Mob assassination plots would make the Bay of Pigs invasion easier for the CIA. Now, if Nixon suggested the use of the Mob at the outset, and those plots were shielded from JFK, this already backs up much of what Stone is theorizing. Trying to prove that the CIA-Mob plots “blew back” and killed Kennedy is more difficult of course. But even Robert Blakey’s House Select Committee wrote that their construction placed all the elements in place for an assassination plot against JFK. And that includes a motive. For as most students of the Bay of Pigs conclude – including me – the operation, as planned, was virtually hopeless. Lyman Kirkpatrick who reviewed the operation at CIA thought this also. Even if the second bombing run had gone off perfectly as CIA wished, Castro had managed to get too much artillery and armor to the beach too fast. This is because there was no surprise, a platoon was in training near the bay, and the bridges to the beach had not been blown. When one adds in simple arithmetic, namely, as Kirkpatrick notes, how the invasion force could surmount being outnumbered by a margin of over fifty to one, one wonders what Bissell was really thinking. Kennedy wondered about it also. He came to the conclusion, as others have, that the CIA thought Kennedy would send in American forces to save the mission, which is precisely what Nixon told Kennedy he would have done. The CIA tried to cloud the fact that the invasion was ruinously planned and to shift the blame to Kennedy himself for his alleged cancellation of the second air strike as the reason for failure. Certainly many Cuban exiles believed this canard and it may have encouraged a role in his murder on their part. It’s hard to imagine that Nixon who – according to Ehrlichman – was trying to get the secret report of the Bay of Pigs, was not aware of a good deal of this.

    Ambrose rejects all of the above. But yet it is Ambrose who also condemns Stone for suggesting that Kennedy was killed for his attempt to remove the U.S. from Vietnam. Yet, that removal, as the Review Board has shown is now not open to debate. As Stone notes, one of Ambrose’s functions, like his journalistic counterpart Chris Mathews, seems to be to elevate and whitewash Nixon and to denigrate and deflate Kennedy. Ambrose, that supposed careful scholar, actually said on a biography show about Nixon, that the late president was quite fair to Alger Hiss. Yet, as Robert Parry discovered, on the newly declassified tapes, Nixon admits that he deliberately leaked all sorts of hazy material on that case to the press so that Hiss would be sure to be indicted by a grand jury in New York and have to stand trial. When the first trial ended with no verdict rendered, Nixon took to the stump and railed against the judge in the case to get him removed from a second trial. How could Ambrose ignore these facts? They are not in doubt and not arguable.

    Schlesinger blasts the “high cabal” thesis of Stone’s film on the assassination. Like so many others, he deliberately distorts it by expanding it beyond the facts of the film. According to Arthur Schlesinger, the conspiracy included the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, the FBI, the military-industrial complex, anti-Castro Cubans, homosexuals, and the Mafia. As I have argued before, this is not what the film depicts. He then goes in for character assassination. He smears Fletcher Prouty as a fantasist. This is poppycock. Prouty’s two published books, as well as his essays, have contributed as much or more to the secret history of this country as almost any author I can think of. There are many things in his work about the Kennedy administration that do not appear in Schlesinger’s book and are invaluable to any accurate portrait of his presidency and his murder. Jim Garrison is termed a “con man”. Some con artist. A man who blows his career in pursuit of justice – with no help from Kennedy’s pals, of which Schlesinger is supposed to be one.

    Schlesinger concludes his discussion of JFK with a puzzling sentence, “Still, except for supreme artists like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Verdi, and Delacroix, dramatic license should not be corrupted by ideology, as it certainly has been in JFK.” My question is this: Where is the ideology? People of the left, right, and center can all agree that a high-level plot killed Kennedy and that plot was probably based on policy disputes. For many reasons, all the blanks can’t be filled in (but both Prouty and Garrison were trying to do so.) This very fact justifies and necessitates the use of dramatic license. And the importance of the issue as a historical puzzle further justifies that usage. The public deserves to know everything our government did and did not do about and before this murder. Stone’s film helped in that area to an immense degree. I wish Ambrose and Schlesinger had read the Review Board’s declassified files. Further, that they had used them for their work in this volume. Until they do, Stone is completely justified in making these films and therefore keeping the historical establishment honest. Let’s hope, in that regard, the King project is completed and it helps release the government files on that murder.

  • On Company Business: Light in the Darkness

    […] every once in awhile something good manages to slip through. The Blockbuster video rental chain is another example of a behemoth targeting and then wiping out the corner merchant. Wayne Huzienga now has the biggest video chain in the country. He now sponsors college football bowl games and owns the Miami Dolphins. But at some of his stores, you can actually rent the best film ever made about the CIA. This splendid documentary is called “On Company Business”, and from its opening scenes with Senator Frank Church confronting Bill Colby with a flechette pistol designed for assassination, one knows that this will be an unflinching look at what the Company’s business has wreaked. We won’t detail the many jewels of this program. Trust us and run, don’t walk, to get it. We would like to describe some of the travails of the film’s director, Allan Francovich, and how he encountered two of the research community’s more familiar characters.

    When Francovich completed “On Company Business” in 1980, he had a predictably tough time getting it shown in America. Finally, it got shown on WNET in New York. The CIA insisted on debating the merits of the program afterwards since they realized the show would create a public sensation, which it did. The man chosen to debate Allan was David Phillips. Since “On Company Business” candidly deals with the Agency’s use of assassination as a tool, the moderator asked Phillips how he could condone such acts. Phillips reportedly replied “Murder is such a harsh word. Can’t you use something else?”

    Francovich has recently done another documentary, this one on the downing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland in 1988. The CIA originally stated that Syria and the Iranians were responsible. Later, they changed the official story to blame the Libyans. Why? Because Syria became an ally against Hussein in the Gulf War. The Francovich film blames the original perpetrators. So when it was scheduled to be shown in London, again a debate had to take place. Who spoke for the official U.S. “Libya did it” line? Oliver “Buck” Revell, FBI point man on, among other things, the Kennedy assassination. When Francovich’s film then showed in Australia, who showed up to debate him via satellite? Again, it was Revell. The same man, who, as revealed in last month’s Probe, insists there was no relation between Oswald and the FBI. It should be noted that, while in the Navy, Revell became their liaison to the Warren Commission. It is here where he became acquainted with the FBI. He liked the organization and decided to join up when he got out. To this day, he defends the official Warren Report line he helped formulate.