FSTitle:       Goldwater. (Barry M. Goldwater)

Authors:     Goldwater, Barry M.;  Casserly, Jack
Citation:    Playboy, Sept 1988 v35 n9 p68(8)

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Subjects:    Legislators_Personal narratives
             Presidential candidates_Appreciation
             Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975_Personal
               narratives

People:      Kennedy, John F._Appreciation

Reference #: A6622600

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Full Text COPYRIGHT Playboy Enterprises Inc. 1988

AS 1961 BEGAN, My good friend John F.  Kennedy became
President of the United States.  His personal charm and
eloquence lifted the spirits of millions of Americans.  We
conservatives were not, however, happy with what we saw and
heard.

I was about to fly to Luke Air Force Base outside Phoenix on
a chill April morning in 1961, when a sergeant climbed onto
the wing and said the President wanted to see me as soon as
possible.  While driving across the city, I had a foreboding
about the meeting.  I began to suspect that the reason for
the President's summons was the invasion of Cuba.  The coming
mission was known on Capitol Hill, and there was already
speculation about it in the media.  Why would he call me
unless there was trouble?  There was only one reason: He
needed me to support him publicly.

The White House appeared quiet, even somber That seemed to be
the President's mood when he entered the room.  He appeared
to be preoccupied, though he walked briskly We were relaxed
in each other's company, because of years of private chats in
the Senate. He bantered, "So you want this fucking job, eh?"

I laughed and replied, "You must be reading some of those
conservative right-wing newspapers.

Kennedy grinned but quickly came to the point.  He said
grimly that the first phase of the invasion of Cuba by
antiCastro Cuban forces had not gone as well as expected.
Fidel Castro's air force had not, as planned, been completely
demolished on the ground. Eight B-26s flown by Cuban exile
pilots had made their surprise attack but had destroyed only
half of the Cuban air, force.  Three planes flown by the
exiles had been lost.

Kennedy was clearly having second thoughts about U.S.
participation in the action.  He was questioning the planning
for the invasion and further involvement.  The President
finally said he thought the whole operation might fail.  He
turned, sitting on the edge of his desk, and faced me
directly He then asked what I would do in the situation.

I was stunned.  The President was not a profile in courage,
as portrayed in his best-selling book.  He projected little
of- the confidence and lofty resolve of his eloquent
speeches.  He was another man now that we were, in effect, on
the shores of Cuba.  He did not seem to have the
old-fashioned guts to go on.

Kennedy could see the shock on my face.  There could be no
turning back now.  Nearly 1500 men would soon be on the
beaches at the Bay of Pigs.  We had helped put them wher they
were.  The commander does not abandon men he has sent to
fight.  The President had a professional and moral
responsibility to those men.

Slowly, so the words would sink in, I reminded the President
that our Navy and its fighter planes were standing ready in
nearby waters.  They could be launched to protect thc next
attack of B-26s.  We must destroy all of Castro's planes on
the ground.  Then the exiles could fight their way from the
beaches and spread out across the terrain.

I told Kennedy that our action was moral and legal and would
be understandable to the entire free world.  The United
States could not tolerate Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Every great nation must be willing to use its strength.
Otherwise, it's a paper tiger.  Whether we agree or not,
power belongs to those who use it.

Kennedy still seemed to equivocate.  I didn't understand how
he could, or why he would, abandon those men.  They would be
killed or captured without a chance of accomplishing their
mission or even defending themselves.

I remember the moment well.  Kennedy continued to search my
face and eyes for an answer.  This was also a crucial moment
for me.  For the first time, I saw clearly that I had the
toughness of mind and will to lead the country.  Others might
be more educated or possess greater speaking and social
skills, but I had something that individuals of greater
talent did not have.  I had an unshakable belief in, and
willingness to defend, the fundamental interests of my
country.  It was not a boast.  It was simply a matter of
personal principle.

I told the President, "I would do whatever is necessary to
ensure the invasion is a success." I repeated, "Whatever is
necessary" The President seemed to relax.  My voice had
risen.  It was clear and emphatic.

Kennedy replied, "You're right." I left the Oval Office
fairly sure that the B-26s, escorted by U.S.  Navy fighters,
would soon blow holes to lead those freedom fighters off the
beaches toward Havana.  I was wrong.

The brigade left Guatemala.  The B-26s were first to destroy
Castro's air force on the ground and then support the landing
group with air coven Kennedy gave the go-ahead for the first
air strike with the B-26 bombers launched from Central
America.  Then, for reasons he never explained, he canceled
the follow-up attacks.  U.S.  Navy jet fighters, ready to
support the B-26s from the nearby U.S.S.  Boxer, never
launched their attack.  Kennedy had clearly lost his nerve.
The brigade was routed.  Some 300 men were killed and the
rest were imprisoned.

The President backed away from the counsel of all his top
advisors when he refused to support an all-out attack and
invasion of Cuba.  He allowed the Russians, to remain on the
island on the condition that they withdraw their nuclear
missiles.  The fact is, instead of the eyeball-to-eyeball
victory that the Kennedy Administration claimed over Nikita
Khrushchev, the President actually made concessions to the
Soviet leader.  Those included removing U.S.  missiles from
Turkey The decision not to attack Cuba was disastrous.  We
are still paying for it.

I didn't want to run for the Presidency in 1964.  That's the
God's truth.  To my knowledge, no individual who has run the
race has ever made such a statement.  It's also true that I
knew, and said privately from the start, that I would lose to
President Johnson.  Also, as best as I can determine, no
Presidential candidate has ever said that on the eve of his
campaign.  From my perspective-explaining the conservative
viewpoint-the race itself had greater historical value and
meaning than winning.

On November 2, 1963, the Associated Press released a poll of
GOP state and county leaders.  An overwhelming majority, more
than 85 percent, chose me as the "strongest candidate"
against Kennedy But on November 22, I knew that the bullet
that had killed Jack Kennedy had also shot down my chances
for the Presidency I would not run.

The overwhelming reason for the decision was my personal and
political contempt for Lyndon Johnson.  Johnson was a master
of manipulation.  He solved tough public issues through
private plotting.  His answer to almost everything was a
deal-an air base here, a welfare project there.

Within a month, I made a complete turnaround.  Under
tremendous pressure, I agreed to run against Johnson.

On December eighth, there was a small meeting of some G.O.P.
leaders in our Washington apartment.  One by one, as casually
as if we were talking about a Sunday-afternoon pro football
game, they brought up the G.O.P.  Presidential nomination,
Each maintained that I had to reconsider my decision to drop
out of the race.

I got damned mad at all of them.  Jack Kennedy was dead.  It
was over.  There would never be a battle of issues.  No
battle about the liberal agenda.  Johnson was a dirty
fighter.  Any campaign with him in it would involve a lot of
innuendo and lies.  And Johnson was treacherous, to boot.
He'd slap you on the back today and stab you in the back
tomorrow.

Moreover, L.B.J.  was dull.  He was a lousy public speaker.
The man didn't believe half of what he said.  He was a
hypocrite, and it came through in the hollowness of his
speech.  L.B.J.  made me sick.

The last thing L.B.J.  wanted to do was talk political
principles or beliefs.  He wouldn't do it.  He never believed
in either.  His only political dogma was expediency.  Things
were never right or wrong.  Most problems could be fixed with
cunning and craftiness.

Finally, one by one, each of the Senators spoke.  They talked
of millions of conservatives around the country who had made
a stand in favor of Barry Goldwater.  My friend Denny
Kitchel-lowkey, thoughtful-turned, looked directly at me and
said, "Barry, I don't think you can back down.  You could
lead this country You've got to try it."

Instinctively, intuitively, I knew that the commitment-the
bond I had made with so many conservatives and they with
me-was virtually unbreakable at this point.  It was all oven
I All right, damn it, I'll do it."

We made a lot of mistakes.  It was my decision to discuss the
selling of the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville and
Social Security's financial crunch in Florida.  We made other
strategic and tactical errors &om the shortsighted viewpoint
of an election victory I never blamed anyone. "Our ineptitude
made us different from most campaigns," said Kitchen later It
was a magnificent, screwy, splendid undertaking.

We were a bunch of Westerners, outsiders, with the guts to
challenge not only the entire Eastern
establishment-Republican and Democratic alike-but the vast
Federal apparatus, the great majority of the country's
academics, big businesses and big unions and a man with an
ego larger than his native state of Texas, Lyndon Johnson.

Following the convention, we embarked on a 100-day journey
that took us to more than 100 cities and towns-nearly 100,000
miles.  I addressed millions of fellow citizens and ate more
lousy cheeseburgers than I care to remember.

As we kicked off the campaign, two concerns began nagging at
me-that neither the racial debate nor the Vietnam war should
become an issue in the campaign.  In late August, I phoned
President Johnson and requested a private meeting of "mutual
concern." Johnson agreed, but quickly sent his White House
scouts around Washington to "find out what Goldwater is up
to." He never learned, since no one but me even knew I wanted
a meeting.  Some White House aides guessed, however, that I
might bring up civil rights.  They were half right.

The meeting took place in the White House a few days before
Labor Day.  Johnson shook hands warmly He put his hand on my
shoulder.  In the Senate, we called it the "half Johnson":
You were in a bit of trouble, but it wasn't serious.  When he
stretched his long arm around your back to the other shoulder
that was the "full Johnson." It meant you weren't cooperating
and he was going to squeeze you on some project you needed
back home until you voted for his latest pet bill.  Then
there was "skinny-dip Johnson," who invited you to the White
House pool and insisted you swim in the raw with him.  Some
fellows got embarrassed when Johnson began leading them
around the basement without a towel.  A few would agree to
almost anything to keep their shorts on.  Not me.  I've been
swimming in the nude since I was a kid.

When Johnson negotiated, and it was clear that he felt some
deal would be proposed, his eyes would begin to narrow.  He
was taking a bead on you, as he would on a squirrel.  It was
his intimidation routine.  I began that day by saying that
both of us had been around Washington a long time, that we
were divided by philosophy and party but that we shared a
love of country.

"That's right, Barry," he said.  "You and I are not like some
people around the country.  We're Americans first."

He appeared to refer to antiwar protesters.  It was a perfect
opening, and I took it, telling the President that there was
already too much division in the nation over the war.  We
should not contribute to it by making Vietnam an issue in the
campaign.

Johnson took a deep breath and sighed in relief.  He jumped
into his SamHouston-at-the-Alamo defense, with a do-or-die
pitch about his difficulties in Vietnam.  Finally, out of
ammunition, he thanked me for the pledge.  I interpreted that
to mean he agreed.

I said the same about civil rights-that if we attacked each
other, the country would be divided into different camps and
we could witness bloodshed.  The President solemnly nodded.
He said events were moving too quickly and we should try to
calm the country.  We shook hands.  We honored the spirit of
that private pact throughout the campaign.

But reflecting on .the campaign now, perhaps the Vietnam war
should also have become a matter of public debate.  I had
suggested to and agreed with President Johnson not to make a
partisan political issue out of it to avoid further division
on the home front.  In retrospect, had Johnson and I squared
off on the issue, the President might have revealed his
intention to escalate the conflict without a military plan or
diplomatic policy to win the war.  We might have saved many
American lives.

During 1964, I discussed the theoretical possibility that
some day, the American military might - use tactical-not
strategic-nuclear weapons.  Today, NATO's defense is based on
the possible use of nuclear weapons.  As a candidate, I
brought to the attention of the American people an issue of
the gravest importance and was castigated for it.  Never did
I advocate the use of such weapons.

Yet Johnson, Bill Moyers, who later became his press
secretary, and others in the White House waged a campaign of
fear against me in what came to be known as the "card" and
"bomb" ads.  In their campaign television commercials, they
portrayed me as a destroyer of Social Security and a mad
nuclear bomber.  I was depicted as a grotesque public
monster.  They converted my campaign slogan from "In your
heart, you know he's right" to "In your guts, you know he's
nuts."

Their card ad showed two handsmeant to be mine-tearing apart
a Social Security card.  That was what Barry Goldwater would
do if he became President, the commercial threatened, so save
the system and elect President Johnson.  The ad was a
repellent lie.  Moyers knew it yet approved the ad, and it
was shown throughout the campaign.

Moyers ordered two bomb commercials from the New York
advertising firm of Doyle Dane Bernbach.  He oversaw and
approved their production.  The first was a one-minute film
that appeared during prime time on NBC.  It showed a little
girl in a sunny field of daisies.  She begins plucking petals
from a daisy.  As she plucks the flower, a male voice in the
background starts a countdown: ten : . .  nine .  .  .  eight
.  .  .  his voice becoming stronger.  The picture suddenly
explodes and the child disappears in a mushroom cloud.  The
voice concludes by urging voters to elect President Johnson,
saying, "These are the stakes: to make a world in which all
of God's children can live, or to go into the dark.  We must
either love each other or we must die.  Vote for President
Johnson on November third.  The stakes are too high for you
to stay home."

There was no doubt as to the meaning: Barry Goldwater would
blow up the world if he became President of the United
States.

The White House exploded its second bomb about a week later,
again on network television.  Another little girl was licking
an ice-cream cone.  A soft, motherly voice explained in the
background that radioactive fallout had killed many children.
A treaty had been signed to prevent such destruction.  The
gloomy voice said a man-Barry Goldwater-had voted against the
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. A Geiger counter rose in a crescendo
as a male voice concluded, "Vote for President Johnson on
November third.  The stakes are too high for you to stay
home."

The commercials completely misrepresented my position, which
called for treaty guarantees and other safeguards for the
United States.  Republican National Chairman Dean Burch filed
a protest about the commercials with the toothless Fair
Campaign Practices Committee.  The committee requested that
the Democratic National Committee drop the ads, which Johnson
and Moyers were forced to do. They later claimed that the ads
would have been canceled anyway.

Those bomb commercials were the start of dirty political ads
on television.  It was the beginning of what I call
electronic dirt. Moyers and the New York firm will Ion be
remembered for helping launch that ugly development in our
political history.

Over the years, I've watched Moyers appear on CBS News and
the Public Broadcasting Service.  He has lectured us on
truth, the public trust, a fairer and finer America.  He
portrays himself as an honorable, decent American, Every time
I see him, I get sick to my stomach and want to throw up.

Toward the end of the 1964 campaign, several newsmen asked me
for one last thought.  I was sipping a bourbon and was
finally beginning to relax a bit.  "There was one big
disappointment," I said.  "We may not have spelled out the
issues as well as we could have.  That was the point of it
allthe point of the entire campaign." I put down the drink
and said, "If Jack were here, we would have had a good
campaign."

Those were my final words of the campaign.  My wife, Peggy,
and I went home.  As we drove north toward Camelback
Mountain, she was very quiet.  I looked at her and simply
said, "Peg, we were ahead of our time."

We lost to the Johnson- Humphrey ticket, 43,000,000 to
27,000,000 votes, a Democratic landslide.  The
Goldwater-Miller ticket won six states.

This old-timer has led two lives all these years, from my
early days in school to my last in the U.S.  Senate.  Show me
a gadget and you've found a handyman who'll be late to
dinner.  Lead me to a car engine or a television set on the
fritz and you're talking with an amateur mechanic who just
decided not to go to a party Taxi a new military fighter
plane onto a runway and you've got an old jet jock who has
tossed his day's schedule-sometimes even in the Senate-into
the wastebasket.

Flying is my first love.  It has been a hobby and a part-time
careen I flew in the U.S.  Army Air Corps for about four
years in World War Two.  After the war, flying was so much in
my blood that I formed Arizona's Air National Guard, The
Government even paid me for it.  That was the only time I
ever beat the Feds.

Over nearly 60 years, I've piloted about 15,000 hours and
logged 7,000,000 or 8,000,000 miles in the air.  It always
seemed better than a lot of the hot air around Washington.

My family will never forget fliers Jimmy Doolittle and Chuck
Yeager for saying that for many years, every pilot in the
military knew he had a copilot up there flying with him.  His
name was Barry Goldwater He did his damnedest on the Senate
floor to get them more flying time and better planes.

A plaque hanging from my office wall reminded me each day of
my obligation to our younger generation of military pilots.
It carried me through some heavy thunderstorms on Capitol
Hill.

It was found by my friend Bill Quinn in a small shop in
Seoul, South Korea.  It reads:

A PILOT'S PRAYER

GOD GRANT ME THE

EYES OF AN EAGLE, THE RADAR OF A BAT AND THE BALLS OF AN

ARMY HELICOPTER

PILOT

After the 1964 election, I got back on the speaking circuit,
but this time, I was making money, more than I ever had in my
life.  The speeches covered the gamut of public issues, but
audiences were primarily interested in two topics-where the
Republican Party was going and how to win the war in Vietnam.

For the next four years, the war became one of the driving
forces of my life.  I regularly spoke with American troops in
Vietnam through the MARS network that had been patched into
the ham-radio shack next to our home.  I also toured our
military bases on five visits to Vietnam, getting the views
of many old friends and acquaintances-military commanders,
pilots and GI's in the field.  I was still flying in the Air
Force Reserve.

In the spring of 1965, I decided to visit President Johnson
in the White House.  We discussed the war and my travels to
Vietnam and around the United States.  I told the President
that when you go to war, the first decision you must make is
to win it.  There were too many political restrictions on our
commanders, including bombing limitations and a ban on "hot
pursuit" into enemy sanctuaries in Laos, Cambodia and North
Vietnam.  We weren't trying to win the war.  We were in a
twilight zone, fighting a political conflict while using
troops as pawns.

It was clear from our conversation that Johnson was playing
the war by ear.  Neither he nor Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara had any definitive strategy or policy for victory.
I told Johnson and old colleagues on Capitol Hill that we had
two clear choices: Either win the war in a relatively short
time, say within a year, or pull out all our troops and come
home.  If the choice had been to win it, I would first have
addressed the Congress and the American people and spelled
out our choices-a short or long war, projected casualties and
financial costs, the long-term effects on the American
economy and the need for national unity.  As Commander in
Chief, I would have stated precisely what I proposed to do.
At the same time, I would have warned the North Vietnamese by
dropping thousands of leaflets on Hanoi and the rest of the
country.  My address and those messages would have said
clearly that either they halt the conflict or we would wipe
out all their in intallations-the city of Hanoi, Haiphong
harbor, factories, dikes, everything.  I would have given
them a week to think about it.  If they did not respond, we
would literally have made a swamp of North Vietnam.  We would
have dropped 500-pound bombs and obliterated their
infrastructure.  Also, I would have sent our troops north and
used our sea power to mine and blockade North Vietnamese
ports.

I never discussed nor advocated the use of nuclear weapons
with Johnson or anyone else in authority I supported a total
conventional air, ground and sea war That was not to be.
Indeed, late in the conflict, it would not have been
supported by most Americans.  By then, millions saw little
purpose to the war

Some argue that in the course of the conflict, we actually
hit North Vietnam with more bombs than were dropped in World
War Two. They add that our most sophisticated weaponry did
not halt the march of men and supplies from North to South
Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The trail was the wrong target.  There was, in fact, no
single supply route.  The trail changed every few days.  In
our limited time frame, knocking it out was not the answer.
There was too much territory to cover in Laos and Cambodia.

I know, because I flew over the trail as well as over the
North Vietnamese supply depots and troop sanctuaries in Laos
and Cambodia on visits to Vietnam between 1965 and the end of
1969.  My first flight over the trail and Communist staging
areas in Laos and Cambodia in 1965 was about six months after
the Presidential campaign.  I was 56 years old.  The last was
in 1969, when I was 60 and had returned to the Senate.  The
official reason for my visits was to talk with MARS outfits
to see if they had sufficient equipment to contact radio
stations leading to the United States.  I was still a
brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve.

I never wanted to talk about those missions, because some
people might say, "There goes Goldwater again, still trying
to get into combat." Now that the war is over and I'm pretty
much out of public life, a few thoughts about those flights
may be informative.

My first reconnaissance was in a slowmoving Army twin-engine
Beechcraft Bonanza, which flew at about 2500 feet.  I wanted
to have a close look at the thickness of the jungle and
determine whether our pilots could see supplies moving.  It
was important to know if heavy bombing in the area was a
realistic objective.

I saw very little of the trail, despite our low altitude and
slow speed.  The same was true for our small spotter planes.
After a two-hour flight over the trail, during which we
caught glimpses of narrow paths as well as some open
stretches, I saw that hundreds of walkways crisscrossed one
another over the long, wide terrain.  It was a hidden and
dispersed target, not ideal for heavy bombing.

On other missions, I flew in T-39s.  We went farther north,
where I spotted North Vietnamese surface-to-air missiles and
smaller anti-aircraft support.  Presumably, we were flying
over North Vietnam, though I no longer have the flight plans.
We again flew over Laos and Cambodia, where the North
Vietnamese had placed SAM and other anti-aircraft firepower
U.S.  pilots were not allowed to bomb those sites unless
fired upon.

On several occasions, I flew Marine helicopters from Danang.
We were never fired on, but those flights were tricky,
because we often flew lower than the hilltops on either side.
It would have been easy for any sniper to open up on us.
After one of those flights, the North Vietnamese fired a
120-millimeter rocket into our Danang billets.  It exploded
nearby and killed several Marines.  I still have a piece of
that shrapnel as a reminder of that day.

Those flights convinced me that we should never have made the
Ho Chi Minh Trail a prime target.  Rather, we should have
concentrated our firepower on the North Vietnamese's sources
of waging war-harbors, cities, protective dikes and similar
areas.

My plan-as tough as it may seem to some-would have been more
merciful to both sides.  The war continued for another
decade, with 58,000 American dead, 303,000 wounded and
perhaps 1,000,000 Vietnamese killed.  Many more were injured
on both sides.  And none of this describes the civilian
suffering.

As Johnson and McNamara upped the ante in Vietnam, an ironic
twist from the Presidential campaign came to haunt them.  It
was an anonymous quote on Johnson's claim that if elected,
Barry Goldwater would lead the nation into a massive war in
Southeast Asia.  The quote was, "I was told that if I voted
for Goldwater, we were going to war in Vietnam.  I did, and
damned if we didn't."

In 1969, I returned to the U.S.  Senate for a third term
after defeating Roy Elson, a longtime aide to Senator Carl
Hayden, by a wide margin.  Richard Nixon became our 37th
President.

Despite the positive contributions Richard Nixon made to his
country, his lies will probably be remembered longer than his
legitimate labors.  He was the most dishonest individual I
ever met in my life.  Nothing in my public life has so
baffled me as Nixons failure to face Watergate from the time
of the burglary and tell the entire truth.

In December 1973, after publicly criticizing Nixon for not
coming clean to the American public, I was invited to have
dinner with the President and Mrs.  Nixon.  It was, to say
the least, remarkable timing and turned out to be a most
unusual experience.

Pat Nixon greeted me in the secondfloor yellow oval sitting
room of the family quarters.  A comfortable Christmas fire
crackled.  I had a small glass of sherry We chatted amiably

Other guests arrived-Bryce Harlow and his wife, Betty, Pat
Buchanan and his wife, Shelley, speechwriter Ray Price, Julie
and David Eisenhower, Rosemary Woods, the President's
longtime personal secretary, and Mary Brooks, an old friend
of the Nixons' who was director of the U.S.  Mint.

The President entered after we were assembled.  He was quite
amiable, even garrulous.  He moved quickly among us, rapidly
jumping from one topic to another.  Then, unexpectedly, his
mind seemed to halt abruptly and wander aimlessly Each time
after such lapses, he would snap back w a new subject.  I
became concerned.  I had never seen Nixon talk so much yet so
erractically as if he were a tape with unexpected blank
sections.

Pat Nixon eased us into the private family dining room.  It
was the first time I had the pleasure of dining there.  As
soup was served, Nixon was preoccupied with whether he and
Pat should take the train to Key Biscayne, Florida, for a
brief Christmas rest, The question seemed odd, even bizarre,
considering all that was happening in Washington.  The
President asked for my opinion.  I told him that the trip was
fine.  However, if he were caught on the train without good
communications and something serious happened in the world,
the country would never forgive him.  I said, "Act like a
President."

The words shot out with a sting I never intended.  Perhaps it
was my subconscious talking.  I was upset about Nixon's
obsession with Watergate and his lack of leadership.  What
was so important about a trip to Florida?  He didn't have his
priorities straight.  I bit my lips to say no more.  But such
gibberish coming from the President of the United States when
the mood of the country was approaching a crisis worried me.

Nixon continued his ceaseless, choppy chatter I was becoming
more and more uncomfortable.  What's going on?  I asked
myself.  Why is Nixon rambling all over the map?  Hunching
and quickly dropping his shoulders?  Incessantly sputtering,
constantly switching subjects? Finally, searching for some
reaction to his erratic behavior among his family and other
guests, I asked myself the unthinkable: Is the President
coming apart because of Watergate?

Suddenly, Nixon was addressing me: "How do I stand, Barry?"

He did not, of course, mention Watergate.

The table fell silent for the first time that evening.  I
said the obvious: "People are divided-those who want you to
go and others who wish you'd stay Among the latter, there's a
particular group who believe a President should not resign."

It was a tip-off.  I was telling him that some of us in
Congress neither expected nor wanted a President of the
United States to quit..It would humiliate the office in the
eyes of the world and was too horrible for Americans to
contemplate.

There was no reaction to my remarks-none whatever.  I sat
back, stunned and silent.

Julie looked at her plate.  Price and Buchanan seemed to be
staring into the distance.  Harlow gazed at me without
expression. Rosemary Woods toyed with her salad.  Nixon
peered into the bottom of his wineglass.

They all knew what I was telling them.  It was simple and
straightforward.  I wanted the President to go on television
and tell the American people the truth whatever it was.

Dinner ended on a somber, strained note, with several
stretches of silence-except for the President.  He jabbered
incessantly, often incoherently, to the end.

I phoned Harlow the following day and bluntly questioned him
about the President's behavior.  He said that Nixon was drunk
before and during dinner.  To this day, Pat Buchanan will not
comment on it.

The evening was a watershed for me.  Nixon appeared to be
cracking.  The Presidency was crumbling.  I would not stand
idly by if the situation worsened.  Nixon had to come clean,
one way or the other.

To thisday, Nixon has never asked the nation for forgiveness.
Yet he was given a pardon by President Ford.  Ford called me
just after granting the pardon but before announcing it.  It
was four A.M.  when the phone rang at Newport Beach,
California, where Peggy and I were on vacation.  I said, "Mr.
President, you have no right and no power to do that.  Nixon
has never been charged or convicted of anything.  So what are
you pardoning him of?  It doesn't make sense.

Ford said, "The public has the right to know that in the eyes
of the President, Nixon is clear."

I replied, "He may be clear in your eyes, but he's not clear
in mine."

The changes in the Republican Party in the past three
generations have been enormous.  But some observers already
see cracks in the solidity of the new G.O.P and the
conservative cause.

Ronald Reagan will be missed.  I will miss him.  We fought
for the conservative cause and were good friends, to boot.

However, I am critical of President Reagan, especially for
the Iranian arms sale.  It was the biggest mistake of his
Presidency to have traded with the most notorious terrorist
gang in the world.  I believe the President did know of the
diversion of Iranian funds to the Contras.  He had to know.
The White House explanation makes him out to be either a liar
or an incompetent.

But whatever mistakes he might have made, Reagan has managed
to do something that no one in the nation has accomplished
since Teddy Roosevelt.  He has projected a Republican
populism-indeed, a conservative populism.  He represents the
spirit of the modern Republican Party, with its themes of
family, hard work, patriotism and opportunity.

Nostalgia for old days and other times rises like the sun
most of my mornings.  But in the evening, when the cool
desert air refreshes my spirit, my blood flows faster and I
shake my fist at the present.  I am not happy with what I saw
in my last years in Congress-nor about today or tomorrow.

A Senator no longer lives or dies on his legislative
effectiveness, as in the old days.  Appearances-media
attention, staff-generated bills and professional
packagingoften replace legislative tenacity.

The younger members of Congress seem to know a little about
everything but not enough about anything.  The Senate floor
today is often chaos.  It's every man for himself; his
personal agenda, not completing the business of the
institution.  That makes one Senator temporarily more
powerful, but often renders the body powerless.

Senators often don't know what they're voting on.  That's a
lousy way to run a lemonade stand, much less our national
legislative process.  My bill to reorganize the Department of
Defense ran 645 pages.  I myself had a helluva time
understanding everything in it. Multiply that several
thousand times and you begin to have some idea of the
confusion in which Congress operates.

Worse yet, members often haven't the foggiest notion of the
long-range implications of a law they have passed.  Members
of the Federal bureaucracy wind up interpreting and
finalizing the law.  No one elected them.  They are
responsible to nobody So off they go into the wild blue
yonder!

The final weeks of almost every session of the Congress now
look and sound like a bargain-basement sale.  Bills are
passed so wildly that they often contain unprinted
amendments.  That means Congress is passing legislation it
has never read!

A new breed of Senator, born of a much more independent and
self-centered attitude, walks the corridors of power today
These new Senators are interested in doing a good job, but
their mentality is different from that of most of their
predecessors.  The first priority of most is re-election.
Genuine accomplishment in the Senate is secondary.

The same is true in the House.  Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, in his
decade as Speaker, was much of the time unable to control a
bunch of Democratic Young Turks.  They ranged from those with
a TV-celebrity complex, such as Brooklyn Democrat Stephen
Solarz, to political punk rockers, such as California's Ron
Dellums, whose behavior reflected the unpredictability of the
Democratic Party itself.

In my 30 years in Congress, the most self-serving group was
the black caucus, which thrived on charges of racism.  They
saw most black problems as civil rights issues, not questions
to be solved in and of themselves.  Black leadership in
Congress still lives 20 to 30 years in the past.  Men such as
Michigan's John Conyers, Jr., and Dellums peddle the past.
Black leaders can no longer merely plead economic and
cultural deprivation.  It won't wash.  The nation desperately
needs new black leaders with ideas, ingenuity and modern
goalsnot yesterday's pols who treat their people with
contempt by addressing them with old slogans and tired
promises of Government salvation.

But I was never put under greater pressure than by the
Israeli lobby, nor has the Senate as a whole.  It's the most
influential crowd in Congress and America, by fan The
Israelis can come up with 50 or more votes on almost any bill
in the Senate that affects their interest.  They went to
extraordinary lengths to get me to vote for them, even
sending some of my dearest and closest Arizona friends, such
as Harry Rosenzweig, to lobby me in  Washington.

The Israelis never raised the fact of my being half Jewish,
but they stressed protecting Israel in the event of war.  I
told them over and over, "Without a treaty, we've already
promised to go to war to protect Israel.  And the United
States is not getting all that much out of the deal.  I think
Israel is doing pretty well.  I don't worry about Israel when
I go to sleep at night.  I worry about the U.S.
Constitution, which I've sworn to uphold-not Israel's
constitution, not that of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon or anybody
else in the Middle East or the world.  "

That usually shut them up, but they went away mad, because I
was not about to support everything they wanted.

In my life, I've personally spoken to and shaken hands with
about 20,000,000 Americans.  The one question I've been asked
more than any other is this: Should a young person go into
politics? Unhesitatingly, I've always answered yes.  But....

You must have the courage to accept considerable criticism,
much of it unjustified.  You must feel it in your gut and
have the courage to accept defeat and continue toward your
goals.  Finally, you must believe in yourself, in your
principles and in people.  Of all of those, I considered my
belief in people to be my greatest strength.  I genuinely
liked people and still do.  If you don't love people., don't
go into politics.

Title:       Bill Clinton's daily J.F.K. calendar. (Clinton's
             references to John Kennedy in statements) (Brief
             Article)
Citation:    Time, May 31, 1993 v141 n22 p16(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

People:      Clinton, Bill_Addresses, essays, lectures;
             Kennedy, John F._Appreciation

Reference #: A13773716

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Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1993

7 FRI Press conference with the Danish Prime Minister and the
President of the European Commission: "Thirty-one years ago,
President Kennedy made a statement that I believe holds as
true today as it did then. He said, `We see in Europe a
partner with whom we could deal on the basis of full
equality.' "

12 WED New York City: "When President Kennedy took office,
younger than I was when I took office, over 70% of the
American people fundamentally believed that their leaders
would tell them the truth."

14 FRI Press conference: "Mr. McLarty, Mr. Rubin, Ms. Rasco
and Mr. Lake, to name four, and I are, I think, older than
our counterparts were when President Kennedy was President."

17 MON Los Alamos, New Mexico: "President Kennedy stood on
this very spot just over 30 years ago and saluted the great
patriots at Los Alamos."

CAPTION: NO CAPTION

Title:       Two presidents: vanity and politics. (John F.
             Kennedy and Bill Clinton) (Column)

Authors:     Lansner, Kermit
Citation:    Financial World, Nov 23, 1993 v162 n23 p80(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Profile of Power (Book)_Evaluation

People:      Kennedy, John F._Appreciation;  Clinton,
             Bill_Political activity

Reference #: A14552356

=============================================================

Abstract: Several similarities exist between Kennedy and Pres
          Clinton, including the facts that both were
          Democrats who won by slim majorities and introduced
          social reform legislation during their terms.
          Richard Reeves's book, 'Profile of Power,' analyzes
          Kennedy's presidency.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Financial World Partners 1993

OF ALL THE POST-WAR PRESIDENTS, NONE HAS CAPTURED THE
POLITICAL imagination of the American people as completely as
John F. Kennedy has. There is a veritable library of books
about his personal and political life and new ones appear
every year. Richard Reeves's Profile of Power is the most
recent. It is a rather dry, well-researched account of
Kennedy's 34 months in office, based on hundreds of personal
interviews and a thorough study of the printed, oral and
visual record. Books about the Kennedy years range from
adulatory to critically revisionist. Reeves's study is
altogether balanced and remarkably free of passion. It
proceeds chronologically from Kennedy' s inauguration on Jan.
20, 1961, to his death by an assassin's bullets at 12:30 p.m.
on Nov. 22, 1963.

The 30th anniversary of JFK's death will be the occasion for
a spate of seminars, conferences, interviews and
reminiscences about the Kennedy years. R will also be an
occasion, as previous anniversaries were not, to compare the
president of three decades ago with the one who is currently
in office. The comparison is inevitable--and appropriate.
Both men are Democrats; both won by thin margins (JFK beat
Nixon by only 118,574 votes); and both men, labled for their
youth, succeeded a much older president. (It is surprising to
note that Nixon, whom we never think of as young, was only
four years older than Kennedy.)

For reasons that are both personal and poetical, Bill Clinton
has gone out of his way to underline the continuity between
himself and JFK. As they move through the weeks and months of
the Kennedy Administration, readers of Reeves's book will
find it natural to compare the two leaders at different
points in their presidencies. For many, the major drama will
be found in the politico-military challenges they faced. For
JFK the crises were Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam; for Clinton,
Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti. No comparison. Reeves's account of
the way Kennedy's thinking about his domestic agenda
developed is particularly interesting. During a period when
the economy was moving by fits and starts, Walter Heller and
Paul Samuelson undertook to educate the young President in
the principles of Keynesian economics. Both urged the
necessity of lowering taxes. (It puts firings in a certain
perspective to be reminded that in 1961 personal tax rates
escalated from 20% on the first $2,000 of earnings to 50% on
anything between $32,000 and $36,000, and then up to 91% on
marginal incomes above $400,000.)

The ominous magnitude of the current budget deficit has given
a new meaning to the term. But back in 1961, JFK's economists
kept arguing that budget deficits meant new private
investment and new jobs. Kennedy understood this. But he also
understood the traditional American commitment to "puritan
economics."

Reeves tells this story: "Early on [Kennedy] had told Paul
Samuelson that publicly pushing for a tax cut was asking for
it: 'The Republicans would kick us in the balls on that one.'

"'Suppose,' Kennedy said, 'that I ask for something, a bold
program and I don't get it?'

"'Then you've fought the good fight,' Samuelson replied.

"'That's vanity, Paul, not politics,' the President said."

In the event, politics was not enough. JFK never got his tax
bill, nor his health care program for older citizens, nor
much else in the way of social legislation. A coalition of
southern Democrats and the Republican opposition was too
strong. On July 17, 1962, for example, Medicare was defeated
by a 52-48 vote in the Senate. It took the monumental vanity
and political ruthlessness of Lyndon Johnson to change all
this.

Thirty-one years after the defeat of Kennedy's Medicare bill,
another young President personally delivered his own health
care bill to Congress. Here we have a truly "bold program," a
work of monumental complexity, a masterpiece of intricate
social engineering of the kind the Clintons clearly relish.
Kennedy had a different, more relaxed attitude toward
legislative detail. It is ironic that the school of
government named after him is an incubator of the kind of
policy ingenuity so dear to Mr. Clinton.

President Clinton's vanity is to present the Congress--all in
one swoop--with a massive and many-faceted piece of
legislation whose consequences are strictly unpredictable.
His call for universal and comprehensive health care files
the banners of efficiency, economy and quality. It may bring
a burgeoning bureaucracy, spiraling costs and a decline in
the level of care for many citizens. No one is certain.

Mr. Clinton's politics may be found in his announcement
disclaiming "pride of authorship" in the final shape of this
legislation rather than an attempt to impose his will on a
recalcitrant Congress. Whatever happens, he may emerge a
political winner. If Congress does not come up with a health
care package (something the public vaguely wants), he knows
where to put the blame. If it passes a bill, however
different from what he proposes, he can take the credit.
Kennedy would have appreciated this.

Title:       Citizen Kennedy: 'Let the word go forth.' (John
             F. Kennedy)

Authors:     Fairlie, Henry
Citation:    The New Republic, Feb 3, 1986 v194 p14(3)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Liberalism_Analysis
             Presidents_Addresses, essays, lectures

People:      Kennedy, John F._Addresses, essays, lectures

Reference #: A4123750

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT The New Republic Inc. 1986

ON JANUARY 20 it will have been a quarter of a century since
the young president stood bareheaded in the cold, and gave an
inaugural address of such brilliance and power that Sam
Rayburn pronounced it "better than anything Franklin
Roosevelt said at his best--it was better than Lincoln."
Four of the presidents since then have given six inaugural
addresses.  We can remember not a word from any of them,
nothing of the bearing of the men of the atmosphere of the
ceremony.  The inaugural address of John F. Kennedy can be
quoted by those who were not even born at the time.

"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can
do for you; ask what you can do for your country."  There is
no one who thinks that those words were said by Richard Nixon
or Ronald Reagan, and all efforts to play no them have always
failed.  Despite their familiarity, they are not shopworn.
They were--they still are--the key words of the inaugural.
You could put aside everything else about standing on the
walls of freedom round the world, and you would still be left
with that remarkable summons to the citizens of the Republic.

Ideas in politics must sometimes go underground for a while;
the time is not favorable to them.  But underground they
gather new energy and still work their way into the roots of
the nation's life, until the people again feel the need for
them.  One day some new president will find other words to
summon the people from their private pursuits to remember
their obligations to the Union, the Republic, the Res
Publica--the state.

IT IS ASTONISHING to read again the almost liturgical
language in which Kennedy fashioned, sentence by sentence,
his call to the American people.  He began at once with a
series of the rhetorical antitheses he got from Theodore
Sorensen, who wrote most of his major speeches: "We observe
today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom,
symbolizing an end as well as a beginning, signifying renewal
as well as change."  Of course if was exactly "a victory of
party" that was being celebrated, but every new American
president has to disown politics at his inauguration.  In
that opening sentence, past, present, and future were brought
together to proclaim a universal mission: "... the same
revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are
still at issue around the globe."  The mission had been made
universal in time and space.

"Let the word go forth" (whose spine does not tingle still at
the archaism, the almost Old Testament archaism?) "from this
time and place, to a new generation of Americans born in this
century" (like JFK), "tempered by war" (the Second World War
had not yet passed into history), "disciplined by a hard and
bitter peace" (the Cold War was made to seem like an occasion
for national regeneration), "proud of our ancient heritage"
(the mission was given the authority of the past)," and
unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those
human rights to which this nation has always been committed,
and to which was are committed today, at home and around the
world" (the whole, wide world).

There was one decision that was all-important, an
understandable but revealing and radical mistake.  Working on
the early drafts of the speech at Palm Beach, Kennedy was
dissatisfied with each attempt to outline a domestic program.
On January 16, when work on the final draft began, he decided
to make no mention of domestic questions.  Not only was
foreign his dominant interest; as a politician he always trod
warily among the interests that have to be reconciled on
domestic policy.  But in a last-minute addition to the
speech, he added that human rights must be defended as well
"at home."  This was as far as he would go in meeting the
criticism that he was avoiding the issue of civil rights.
The address would have seemed a great deal less martial if he
had leavened it with some real attention to people's
concerned at home.

Already universal, the mision was now made boundles: "Let
every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we
shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship,
support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the
survival and the success of liberty.  This much we
pledge--and more."  What more could be pledged?

You cannot just take snippets for a book of quotations from
this speech.  It was knit together with every word
reinforcing, expanding every other.  So it went on: "the
graves of young Americans ... around the globe"; "a grand and
global alliance"; "maximum danger"; "long twilight struggle";
"patient in tribulation"; ;strength and sacrifice."  By then
who could resist the final call: "And so, my Fellow Americans
..."?

THE LANGUAGE, the elevated sense of purpose, the incitement
to a limitless mission, still seem as dangerous and misplaced
in a democracy in peacetime as they have always seemed to me.
And yet--and yet--how we need something of that voice now.  I
still do not like the reckless wording, the implications, of
the "ask not ..." sentence.  And yet it calls us with a
summons that America and the West pine to hear again, after
Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson
were the last two presidents who in their inaugurations
addressed the American people as if they were citizens.

It is rather an old-fashioned word: "citizen."  When you hear
it now, you think of classes in civics; or your mind reaches
back to the Funeral Oration of Pericles, or to the Romans who
did more to elevate the idea of citizenship than any other
people, or to the Founding Fathers, or to Lincoln, or to the
New Deal--and the Second World War.  You don't hear the word
"citizen" and then think of Grenada.

What passes for conservatism now in America, in the
administration or outside it, has all but dispensed with the
idea of citizenship. No political leader can expect the
American people--or the British, French, or German people--to
sacrifice their lives and their treasures overseas if they
are asked to sacrifice little of their private greed and
pleasures at home.  You are not going to get a people to
fight for the freedom of Indians in the Punjab if they've
been told they may forget the plight of the Indians on the
Pine Ridge reservation.  There is a direct, unequivocal
relationship between the Americans of the New Deal and the
Americans bones of their fathers.  The citizen is public; he
cannot be addressed as private.

Behind every overseas enterprise of a democracy, there must
be a sense of compassion: "These people must be saved--even
with our own lives."  Democracies will not for long go to war
for less.  But what if the springs of compassion are dried up
at home?  What if the citizens have been told they need feel
no compassion for their fellow citizens?  If they have been
told that if they make enough money it will trickle down and
help the whole society?  Then why not let it trickle down and
help all those people abroad?  See how much money the
American people would contribute to a Christmas appeal for
the contras!  And so, you fellow Americans, buy your
condominium and your Volvo--that's your war effort.

Norman Podhoretz worte a column the other day, and I agreed
wholeheartedly with its general drift: that people have been
given far too many excuses to escape the responsibility for
their own lives.  But then at the end there came an attack on
the idea of compassion: we are too compassionate of others,
of their failings, of ourselves, of our own failings.  It
seemed, as I read it, wholly gratuitous to introduce this
harsh, unlovely note.  But it reflected a need in these
former Democrats and liberals not just to correct the
mistakes of their former allies, but to pull down the whole
temple of concern for others they built over the years.  Is
it really necessary to reject civic consciousness, of which
compassion for one's less fortunate fellow citizens is the
ultimate binding cement, to be a conservative or
neoconservative?

The educating fact about John Kennedy is that, although
throughout his presidency he tried to avoid the domestic
questions that would have brought him political difficulties,
his own sense of mission, as defined in the inaugural
address, again and again forced him to act, and usually to
act to the right end.  There was also his sense of the
majesty of the office, and that is a contribution to the idea
of citizenship as well, for although no one can be very happy
about Robert Kennedy's use of the Department of Justice,
there was no way that John Kennedy could have appointed a
John Mitchell as attorney general.

PERHAPS only a schoolboy's education makes me echo the Roman
insistence on the three great civic virtues: dignitas,
gravitas, pietas.  But Kennedy's inaugural address, even
though too elevated, reminded us of those virtues; and to a
great extent so did his presidency, with all its mistakes.
In contract, the current administration has drained, drop by
drop, almost all dignitas and gravitas and pietas from the
public discourse in America.  With the idea of citizenship
all but submerged in appeals to private pursuits, private
satisfactions, the private sector, the most Reagan could hope
to lead against a real enemy would be a herd of the Gadarence
swine.

The Democratic impulse needed correction: no one now sensibly
denies that.  It has not only been corrected--it has been
over-corrected.  The Union needs to be put again before the
States. The public sector needs to be brought back refreshed
to direct the private sector.  The citizen needs to be called
out of his worries about how to live on $85,000 a year.

Will any Democrat before 1986 be unafraid enough, not to use
the language of John Fitzgerald Kennedy 25 years ago, but to
find in it the inspiration to create his own summons to the
citizen that is appropriate to the last 12 years of the 20th
century?  I sadly doubt it.  But in the next two years will
one please try?  If the American is not public, what's left
of the Republic?

Title:       Rallying the nation. (excerpts from presidents'
             speeches in times of war)

Authors:     Sudo, Phil
Citation:    Scholastic Update, Feb 8, 1991 v123 n10 p16(2)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Presidents_Addresses, essays, lectures
             War_Addresses, essays, lectures

People:      Washington, George_Addresses, essays, lectures;
             Lincoln, Abraham_Addresses, essays, lectures;
             Wilson, Woodrow_Addresses, essays, lectures;
             Roosevelt, Franklin D._Addresses, essays,
             lectures;  Kennedy, John F._Addresses, essays,
             lectures;  Bush, George_Addresses, essays,
             lectures

Reference #: A10397977

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Scholastic Inc. 1991

Rallying the Nation

The job of a President involves more than making policy.  In
times of war or great struggle, Presidents must pull the
country together and prepare the troops for battle.  History
shows that some of these leaders succeed famously, while
others never quite move the American public.  John F.
Kennedy, for example, consistently inspired the nation to
action; his successor,Lyndon B. Johnson, often failed.  At
their best, the words of President define out highest
aspirations as a nation, calling us to duty and sacrifice.
The following are a few examples from history.  What do they
have in common?  How do they differ?  Would the words of
George Washington have inspired today's troops in the Persian
Gulf?  Do George Bush's words inspire you?

THE TIME IS NOW NEAR AT hand which must probably determine
whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves....  The fate
of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage
and conduct of this army.  Our cruel and unrelenting enemy
leaves us only the choice of a brave resistance, or the most
abject submission.  We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer
or to die.

-- George Washington, address to American troops before the
Battle of Long Island, 1776.

IT IS NOT MERELY FOR today, but for all time to come, that we
should perpetuate for our children's children that great and
free government which we have enjoyed all our lives....  It
is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may
not loss our birthright ....  The nation is worth fighting
for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.

--Abraham Lincoln, speech to the 164th Ohio Regiment, 1864.

IT IS A FEARFUL THING TO lead this great and peaceful people
into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars.
Civilization itself seems to be in the balance, but right is
more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things
which we have always carried nearest our hearts, for
democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to
have a voice in their own government....  To such a task we
can dedicate our lives, our fortunes, everything we are,
everything we have, with the pride of those who know the day
has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and
might for the principles that gave her birth....

--Woodrow Wilson, address to Congress, 1917, asking for a
declaration of war on Germany.

WE ARE NOW IN THIS WAR.  We are all in it--all the way.
Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most
tremendous undertaking of our American history.  We must
share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats
and the victories--the changing fortunes of ar....  We are
going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that
follows.

--Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio address to the nation, the day
after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, 1941.

LET EVERY NATION KNOW, whether it wishes us well or ill, that
we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship,
support any friend, opoose any foe to assure the survival and
success of liberty.

--John F. Kennedy, inaugural address, Washington, D.C., 1961.

WE ARE READY TO USE force to defend a new order emerging
among the nations of the world, a world of sovereign nations
living in peace.  We have seen too often in this century how
quickly any threat to one becomes a threat to all.  At this
critical moment in history, at a time the Cold War is fading
into the past, we cannot fail.  At stake is not simply some
distant country called Kuwait.  At stake is the kind of world
we will inhabit.

--George Bush, radio address to the nation, January 1991.

Title:       The Kennedy Legacy: A Generation Later._(book
             reviews)

Authors:     Novak, Ralph
Citation:    People Weekly, Sept 5, 1988 v30 n10 p34(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Books_Reviews

People:      Kennedy, John F._Bibliography;  Lowe, Jacques;
             Sheed, Wilfrid

Rev Grade:   A

Reference #: A6624140

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1988

THE KENNEDY LEGACY: A GENERATION LATER Photographs by Jacques
Lowe; Text by Wilfrid Sheed Few of the Kennedy books
published in this sad anniversary year will be as evocative
as this one.  Many of the 100 photographs by Lowe, John
Kennedy's personal photographer, have not been published
before.  They show the man of consummate public charm,
laughing and gently playing with his children, but they also
show the offstage politician, the gleam in his eye replaced
by a steely chill.  The text, by New York-based
critic-novelist Sheed, is a mixed proposition.  His
insistence on referring to people by first names -- ''Jack,''
''Lyndon,'' even ''Nikita'' -- is trivializing.  He is guilty
of pathetic East Coast provincialism, sneering at American
tourists' use of what he calls ''Milwaukee French,'' as if
Wisconsin could never produce anything as elegant as, say,
Hamptons French.  He uses ''Dayton, Ohio, frame of mind'' to
represent a backward community, too, as if everyone agrees
Dayton is a primitive village.  He begins by asking, ''Was
our enthusiasm for Kennedy some sort of mass delusion based
on a hoax?'' His enthusiasm for the Kennedys, however, makes
his answers -- he ends up calling John Kennedy ''a great
President'' -- of suspect value.  He is especially soft in
his discussion of two of JFK's most vulnerable areas: the
degree to which his liaison with ex-Mafia moll Judith
Campbell Exner called his judgment into question and the
extent to which he was responsible for U.S. involvement in
Vietnam.  Sheed resolves the issues by noting that unnamed
friends of the President have said that had Kennedy lived, he
would have avoided involvement with anyone like Exner and
would have avoided a deeper Vietnam War. Despite that kind of
tooth-fairy school of logic, Sheed is such a vivid writer
that the book is often a pleasure to read.  He notes, for
example, that when John Kennedy ran for office in
Massachusetts, ''his whole family had seemed to blanket the
state, as if they were all running for office in a body.''
And he is capable of summing things up with great clarity:
''Kennedy cre ated the impression that anything could happen
in this world and beyond, and that everything was being
considered, and this was at the very heart of the fun.''
(Viking, $24.95) -- Ralph Novak

Title:       Publisher's note. (books based on Life magazine
             material) (column)

Authors:     Valk, Elizabeth P.
Citation:    Life, Nov 1988 v11 n13 p5(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Life (Periodical)_Publishing

People:      Kennedy, John F._Bibliography

Reference #: A6745994

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1988

Many of the photographs that appear in this magazine are so
vivid, so evocative, so worthy of being seen again and again,
that LIFE has become an important source for books of all
kinds.  One extra issue of LIFE, published in December, 1963,
was both a historical document and an instant collector's
item.  This month marks the 25th anniversary of John
Kennedy's death.  After the assassination, the staff worked
48 hours straight through to design and write a memorial
edition.  Two weeks after the tragedy, the 88-page magazine
was on the newsstands.  The first two printings sold out.
LIFE's offices were getting 10,000 requests daily for the
issue and almost three million copies were purchased.  Now
that issue, with a new wraparound cover, has been reproduced
exactly as it appeared originally.  It goes on sale November
7. For those who would like to order a copy (it will not be
sent to subscribers), there is a coupon on page 202.

From other compelling material published first in LIFE, two
books have been assembled by Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., a former
managing editor.  LIFE in Camelot (Little, Brown, $40) is a
picture book about the Kennedy years.  It begins with a 1937
portrait of the entire Kennedy family and ends with Theodore
White's memorable interview with the bereaved Jacqueline
Kennedy -- the article that gave the era the name Camelot.
This volume has 500 photographs, 150 published for the first
time.

Two years ago Kunhardt put together a collection of those
funny, remarkable pictures that serve as the dessert at the
end of each issue.  The book, LIFE Smiles Back, was a
best-seller, and so he has come up with a second volume
called LIFE Laughs Last.  The subtitle is ''200 More Classic
Photos from the Famous Back Page of America's Favorite
Magazine'' (Simon & Schuster, $17.95).  For those of us who
think of animals as slightly human, the pictures in this
jolly volume, which will be in the stores before Christmas,
provide some hilarious supporting evidence.

For the kinds of photographs that made this magazine famous
there is John Loengard's just- published LIFE Classic
Photographs: A Personal Interpretation (New York Graphic
Society, $24.95). Loengard, a photographer who was a LIFE
picture editor for 14 years, selected some great pictures by
such legends as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White,
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, Mary Ellen Mark, Gjon
Mili and almost 80 others.  Many of the photographs are
famous, but what makes the book exceptionally interesting are
Loengard's comments about the photographers, their assignment
and how each particular shot succeeds.

Just as the contents of this magazine are often published in
books, so, too, do some books deserve a preview in LIFE.  One
excerpted this month is The Home Planet, edited by Kevin W.
Kelley for the Association of Space Explorers and published
by Addison-Wesley.  Another excerpt is from Melvyn Bragg's
biography of Richard Burton.  The British actor loved the
English language, and one of his great ambitions was to be a
writer.  Fortunately for us, he kept notebooks, and Bragg
quotes generously from them.  We think you will agree that
Burton's picture of obsessive love, fame, scandal and wealth
-- told from the inside -- makes compelling reading.

Title:       Presidential pages. (more books on the John F.
             Kennedy assassination to come out in November
             1993, the 30th anniversary of the assassination)
             (Brief Article)
Citation:    Entertainment Weekly, August 27, 1993 n185-86
             p12(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

People:      Kennedy, John F._Bibliography

Reference #: A14241332

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Entertainment Weekly Inc. 1993

Call it the missives of November. Just when it seemed the
file on the Kennedys couldn't get any thicker, in sweep
around a dozen new books on America's most famous First
Family, a flood inspired by the 30th anniversary of JFK's
death and the uproar over Oliver Stone's critically acclaimed
JFK. While there has never been a shortage of Kennedy tomes
(4,744 to date), most were released by small publishers and
catered mainly to assassination buffs. But this fall the
torch has been passed to such heavyweight companies as Simon
& Schuster (which just released Joe McGinniss' widely panned
Teddy take, The Last Brother). Among the entries:

* The Killing of a President, by Robert J. Groden, a former
photo consultant who uses previously top secret photos of
JFK's autopsy to argue there was a cover-up (Viking Studio).

* President Kennedy, a detailed play-by-play of JFK's
decision-making by frequent New Yorker contributor Richard
Reeves (Simon & Schuster).

* Case Closed, by lawyer and author Gerald Posner, who uses
new evidence to argue that "Oswald did it" (Random House).

* Who Shot JFK?, a hip, comic-book-style guide to potential
assassins by former RFK speech writer Bob Callahan (Fireside
Books/Simon & Schuster).

Jack Perry, the biography buyer at Waldenbooks, believes this
is only the cusp of a new publishing frontier. "I'm looking
at two books about the younger Kennedys right now," he says,
"a JFK Jr. bio, Prince Charming [Dutton] and one called The
Kennedys: The Third Generation [Thunder's Mouth Press]. With
the grandkids and everything, this thing could go on and on."

Title:       Lest we forget the Bay of Pigs; the unlearned
             lessons.

Authors:     LaFeber, Walter
Citation:    The Nation, April 19, 1986 v242 p537(3)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Bay of Pigs_History
             United States_Relations with Cuba

People:      Kennedy, John F._Foreign relations

Locations:   United States;  Cuba

Reference #: A4211099

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1986

LEST WE FORGET THE BAY OF PIGS

WALTER LAFEBER

President Kennedy's attempt to destroy Fidel Castro's regime
at the Bay of Pigs has rightly been called the perfect
failure.  But the debacle of April 17, 1961, went far beyond
Cuba.  It helped lure the United States down a violent
dead-end street in pursuit of revolutionaries throughout
Latin America.  It resulted in the first Soviet presence in
the hemisphere.  It rapidly accelerated Washington's
disastrous policies in Vietnam.  It caused nations throughout
the world to question U.S. judgment and dependability.
Twenty-five years later Washington officials still do not
understand the reasons for this failure and seem bent on
repeating it.

Certainly no place appeared move vulnerable to U.S. power
than Cuba.  The United States had controlled the island since
1898.  Its ambassador was Cuba's second-most-powerful
official, after the president, and at times the most
powerful.  Fidel Castro changed all that with his victory
over dictator Fulgencio Batista on New Year's Day, 1959.
During the rest of that year, his determination to transform
Cuba led to radical land reforms and other economic changes
that brought him closer to the Cuban Communist Party--which,
as late as 1958, had refused to work with him--and put him on
a collision course with the Eisenhower Administration.  As
historian Richard Welch has put it, North Americans
discovered, to their amazement, "that the Cuban Revolution
was un-American.'

When in early 1960 the United States tried to strangle Castro
with tough economic sanctions, he turned to the Soviet bloc
for help. Eisenhower tightened the choke hold and, in March
of that year, secretly ordered the Central Intelligence
Agency to plan an invasion of Cuba.  U.S. appeals for help in
isolating Cuba drew little response from Latin American
countries, who feared the Cubans less than Washington's
century-old policy of intervention in their affairs.  But two
dependable friends did volunteer:  Guatemalan dictator Gen.
Miguel Ydigoras, one in a succession of military leaders who
ruled that country after the C.I.A. overthrew the elected
reformist government in 1954, and Anastasio Somoza in
Nicaragua.  Those two men provided training bases in their
countries for the Cuban exiles involved in the Bay of Pigs
operation.  This collaboration is indelibly etched in Central
American and Cuban memories.

Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, Kennedy blamed
Eisenhower for losing Cuba to the Communists.  The accusation
trapped the new President.  He discovered that the former
general, an old hand at plotting covert counter-revolutions,
had invasion plans well under way.  Kennedy's State
Department, however, warned that such an incursion would set
back U.S. relations with Latin America and, moreover,
probably fail.  It quickly became obvious that the C.I.A.'s
plans were lacking in intelligence, in both senses of the
word.  The agency and the Administration said openly that
Cuban exiles were going to restore freedom to their homeland,
but clearly the C.I.A. was recruiting, training and
controlling them.  Mutual trust was conspicuously absent.
One agent admitted that he refused to tell the exiles when
they were to invade because "I don't trust any goddamn
Cubans.'  Propaganda about the exiles made U.S. officials
believe that the invasion, carried out by an independently
formed anti-Castro force, would cost this country almost
nothing. The ultimate responsibility lay with the C.I.A. and
Kennedy.  Both desperately tried to ignore the operation's
central problem--North Americans telling the Cubans how to
run their country --by assuming that once the exile force
landed, the Cuban people would spontaneously assist in
overthrowing Castro.

Harboring serious reservations about the operation, Kennedy
decided to cut direct U.S. military support to an absolute
minimum. Nevertheless, he despised Castro and saw himself
going head-to-head with Nikita Khrushchev over which
superpower would control the Third World.  He was also
passionately committed to a romantic view of
counter-revolutionary operations and feared being labeled as
less of an anti-Communist than Eisenhower, whose policies he
had blasted only months earlier.  So the attack went ahead on
the night of April 17.

It was doomed from the start.  In the first place, the C.I.A.
mistook the coral reefs in the Bay of Pigs for seaweed.  The
exile crafts ran aground and were easy targets for Castro's
small but effective air force.  When U.S. naval officers on
an aircraft carrier just offshore urgently requested
permission to launch their planes to support the exiles, the
White House rejected the request. Robert Kennedy recalled:
"We kept asking when the uprisings were going to take place.
Dick Bissell [the C.I.A. official in charge of the operation]
said it was going to take place during the night.  Of course
no uprising did take place.'  Castro killed or captured
nearly all the invaders.  At a televised press conference
Kennedy took full responsibility for the disaster.

Kennedyites have since gone to great lengths to blame the
fiasco on the C.I.A.  But deeper causes than agency bungling
were involved.  In the aftermath, U.S. officials tried to
fool the public into believing that the exile force was
acting on its own and that it was so strongly identified with
the cause of freedom that the Cuban people would rally to its
banner.  Those officials were, and remain, vastly ignorant of
both the damage North American control has inflicted on
Caribbean and Central American societies and the promise of
escape from that past that revolutionaries like Castro seemed
to offer.

Moreover, the exiles could never have conquered Castro's army
without massive U.S. involvement.  That realization led
Senator J. William Fulbright, in a last-ditch attempt to stop
the invasion, to post the classic question:  What if we win?
"Winning' would have meant a U.S. occupation of Cuba and, no
doubt, a bloody guerrilla war.  U.S. troops in Cuba would
have been as unpopular as the Russians are in Afghanistan.
In addition, most Americans took seriously the U.S.
commitment to the Organization of American States Charter of
1948 not to use force to overthrow Latin American
governments.  As it was, the invasion violated that pledge.
The respect for the rule of law that supposedly distinguishes
U.S. foreign policy from that of the Soviet Union was cast
aside.

Kennedy's successors have continued to regard the Bay of Pigs
tragedy as a failure by the "experts' to run a military
operation properly, instead of what it was:  a failure to
understand the political and economic causes of revolution.
By relying on the C.I.A. and the exiles, U.S. officials
unwittingly tried to revive the imperialist past.  Over the
next several years Kennedy's Administration authorized
sabotage, dirty tricks and even assassination attempts to
eliminate Castro.  Those attacks only made the Cuban leader
more popular at home and drove him closer to the Russians.
Finally, in the aftermath of the debacle, Kennedy resolved to
redeem himself by sending more troops to Vietnam.  The
significant escalation of involvement in Southeast Asia by
the end of 1961 was a direct result of Kennedy's misreading
of the lessons to be drawn from the Cuban revolution.  With
the Bay of Pigs invasion Kennedy dealt militarily with the
effects, not the causes, of revolution.

Although sympathetic to the Cuban exiles' cause, Harold
Feeney demonstrates in the following article that the United
States is better at enlisting and exploiting exile forces
than in protecting them or dealing with the long-term social
and political consequences of their actions.  There are
troubling parallels between the C.I.A.-created Brigade 2506
in 1961 and the C.I.A.-created contras in 1986.  As did
Kennedy with the Cuban invasion force, Reagan pretends that
his Nicaraguan "freedom fighters' are an independent band of
dedicated patriots who will stem the tide of communism in the
hemisphere at little cost in U.S. lives and treasure.  Just
as Kennedy raised the specter of "losing' Cuba to Communism,
so Reagan depicts the Nicaraguan revolution in stark cold was
terms and threatens that legislators who oppose his aid
program for the contras will be blamed for losing Central
America to Moscow. Washington's ignorance of the causes of
the "perfect failure' twenty-five years ago, which led to
disaster in Vietnam, is now drawing this country into another
calamity in Central America.

Title:       They shoot allies, don't they? When, 25 years
             ago, Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated, his
             supporters blamed the United States. They were
             right.

Authors:     Winters, Francis X.
Citation:    National Review, Nov 25, 1988 v40 n23 p34(4)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975_History

People:      Ngo Dinh Diem_Assassination;  Kennedy, John
             F._Foreign relations

Reference #: A6827326

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT National Review Inc. 1988

President John F.  Kennedy's dispatch of General Maxwell
Taylor to Saigon on October 17 signals the diplomatic style
of the New Frontier.  Taylor's report on Vietnam, submitted
on November 3, calls for a modest commitment of eight
thousand U.S.  ground troops, whose introduction to South
Vietnam would be masked by designating them as flood-control
specialists.  Saigon

The Kennedy Administration finally pares down the Taylor
proposal of eight thousand troops to seven hundred, but
attaches codicils requiring U.S.  involvement in Saigon
decision-making.  President Ngo Dinh Diem balks.  "Vietnam,"
he informs Ambassador Frederick Nolting, "does not wish to
become a protectorate of the U.S." After reconsideration, the
condition attached to the dispatch of the troops is changed
to merely one of "mutual consultation."

Diem's "intransigence," as it was viewed at this time in
Washington, should not have surprised anyone familiar with
Vietnam. For Diem lived in the shadow of Ho Chi Minh.  Born
in Hut on opposite banks of the Perfume River, they were
weaned on the same revolutionary dream of freeing their
country from the French. Steered by their respective
temperaments, they early elected different routes to
independence.  Ho, a proletarian pilgrim, left Vietnam in the
1920s, studying in Moscow, returning to Vietnam through
China, plunging into the jungle war against the elusive
occupiers, first the Japanese, then the French, finally the
Americans.  His rival, Ngo Dinh Diem, elected the domestic
role of a mandarin moralist.  A brief essay at national
office in 1933, as Emperor Bao Dai's Minister of the Interior
with responsibility for security, ended with his resignation
when he discovered that Vietnam's so-called independence
under the French was illusory.

Ho and Diem met only once as adults.  In 1946 Ho's forces
captured Diem and held him in prison until Ho summoned him
for an interview at his mountain stronghold at Tuyen Quang.
Ho took the prisoner by surprise: "I am ready to offer you a
high post in my government." If Diem was surprised by the
offer, Ho was equally taken aback by the response.  "You and
I want totally different futures for Vietnam.  Can you
guarantee that you will not impose a dictatorship of the
proletariat here?" Diem then put Ho's protestations to the
test.  "I will accept the Ministry of the Interior [police]
with full control of intelligence." Ho did not turn down the
counter-offer out of hand.  He deliberated two weeks before
judging such a division of his power unwise.  Their parting
words were these:

DIEM: "I don't believe you understand the kind of man I am.
Look me in the face.  Am I a man who fears?"

Ho: "No, you are not such a man."

DIEM: "Good, then I will go now." Four years later Ho issued
a death warrant for Diem, who fled to the United States.
During his years there, Diem received Vietnamese visitors who
offered support for his return to Vietnam.  Americans,
too-who spanned the political spectrum from Justice William
0.  Douglas to Francis Cardinal Spellman-promoted his return
to Saigon as an alternative to Ho Chi Minh.  It was Justice
Douglas who hosted a luncheon at the Supreme Court in 1953 to
introduce Diem to Senators John F.  Kennedy and Mike
Mansfield.  Finally, that same year, Emperor Bao Dai's
counselors agreed on Diem as their candidate for Prime
Minister of Vietnam.

A Confucian moralist, Diem was also a monarchist, whose
political philosophy assumed the immutability of social and
political order, incarnated in the person of the ruler.  He
took a distinctly pragmatic view of this, however,
successfully ending the rule of Bao Dai, whom he regarded as
an irresponsible ruler, through a referendum in 1954.  Diem
subsequently held several "demonstration elections." But he
resented the unrelenting American pressure to change the
Vietnamese political order so that it would more closely
resemble the American order.  He felt that mimicking American
political activity did not accord with the realities of
Vietnamese society, would be demeaning, and would serve
mainly to undermine his own authority.

Aware that his nationalist credentials were weak in
comparison with the martial aura of Ho Chi Minh, Diem had an
uphill struggle resisting the Americans' efforts to remake
him in their own image. Nonetheless Diem and his American
allies made remarkable social progress from 1956 to 1962,
doubling rice production, increasing rubber productivity,
diversifying agriculture, redistributing lands, doubling the
commercial fishing catch, eliminating the need to import
sugar.  At the same time, he equipped an army of 350,000.
These fragile threads of stability began to display a pattern
of success that would later cause Ho to recall: "1962 was
Diem's year." New Delhi and Georgetown

Conscious of his adversary in Hanoi, Diem was unaware of
another one in New Delhi.  There, the U.S.  Ambassador -John
Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard economics professor and sometime
tutor to John F.  Kennedy-fretted about the destiny of
America's young President.  As Diem was anxious about his own
image of independence from Kennedy, Galbraith worried about
Kennedy's image of association with this Oriental despot.
Writing to his friend Arthur Schlesinger in October 1961, he
proposed agitating to send Averell Harriman to Saigon as
ambassador to demand democratic reforms from the regime.

Galbraith would have his chance to carry his fight against
Diem to the White House when he returned the following month,
accompanying Nehru on a state visit.  Meeting with the
President, Nehru, Harriman, and Rusk on November 7, Galbraith
is pleased to hear Kennedy broach the topic of Vietnamese
neutrality to Nehru. Later in Galbraith's Washington stay,
he, Harriman, and Schlesinger chat over dinner about an
alternative strategy in Vietnam; simply removing Diem from
power.  Still later this month Galbraith "purloined" (his
word) the highly classified report of the Taylor mission to
Vietnam.  Outraged by the report's recommendation that eight
thousand U.S. troops be dispatched there, Galbraith seeks and
secures Kennedy's approval to visit Vietnam to evaluate the
adequacy of its government.  After three "intensive" days in
Saigon, Galbraith judges the government to be illegitimate,
urging Kennedy to "drop Diem" in favor of a military regime.

(Galbraith later volunteered that the advice he gave to
Kennedy masked his real view, which was that the U.S.  should
"return that part of the world [Vietnam] to the obscurity for
which God had so obviously predestined it." When asked why he
offered the President quite contradictory advice on a matter
of great national moment, he admitted that the President, who
feared that losing Vietnam might result in losing the 1964
election, would have cut him out of the inner circle of the
White House if he had spoken the truth about Vietnam.) Glen
Ora, Virginia

Galbraith, back in Washington, is invited to the weekend
White House at Glen Ora, in the Virginia hunt country.  The
President, Galbraith, and Schlesinger discuss the possibility
of a neutralist settlement in Vietnam.  Kennedy asks
Galbraith to draft a memo proposing such a solution, which
Galbraith does, with the help of Averell Harriman.  Harriman,
sharing Galbraith's contempt for Diem, proposes approaching
Ho Chi Minh with an offer of mutual (U.S./ Vietcong)
reduction of forces in South Vietnam.

Geneva

Harriman succeeds in negotiating the Laos Accords, which
"guarantee" the neutrality of that nation without, however,
providing any measures to verify compliance.  Diem objects to
the Accords, which unilaterally shield North Vietnamese
troops in Laos from attack by South Vietnam.  The South
Vietnamese delegate to the Laos conference walks out.

Saigon

Harriman arrives to persuade Diem to sign the Laos Accords.
When Diem starts to outline the objections, Harriman
ostentatiously yanks his hearing aid from his ear, closing
his eyes and waiting for the storm to pass.

Later, Ambassador Nolting persuades Diem to sign the Accords,
which would permit Ho Chi Minh to construct without
interference the trail from North to South Vietnam that would
come to bear his name. Harriman's critics later rename the
trail the "W.  Averell Harriman Memorial Highway."

Geneva

Harriman is authorized by Kennedy to make the first official
approach to North Vietnam, seeking out the Foreign Minister,
Ung Van Khien, to offer an extension of the generous terms of
the Laotian "neutrality" to Vietnam as well.  Harriman's
instructions include cautions to conceal this demarche from
Diem, who is, quite reasonably, assumed to be opposed to this
offer to abandon South Vietnam to the Communist North.

While his admirers, including the magnanimous Dean Rusk,
considered Harriman "an able generalist," his critics thought
the expression "general ableist" more fitting.  The governor,
displaying the energy and ambition of an adolescent, was able
to effect anything a (Democratic) President wanted.  The
formula worked as predicted with Kennedy, who promoted
Harriman to the post of Under Secretary of State for
Political Affairs in March 1963.  Palm Beach, Florida

Senator Mike Mansfield reports to Kennedy on a visit to Diem
made on a trip requested by the President.  Mansfield's
gloomy assessment reflects his shock at the deterioration in
Diem's personal and political condition.  Mansfield, who had
supported Diem for a decade, has now given up on him, urging
JFK to prepare for a retreat from the beleaguered outpost.
Kennedy angrily rejects the report, but later regrets his
response.

Alarmed by the revelations of Diem's declining fortunes,
Kennedy dispatches Mike Forrestal (now McGeorge Bundy's
Southeast Asia officer on the National Security Council) and
Roger Hilsman (who was soon to replace Harriman as Assistant
Secretary of State for the Far East) to Vietnam to reassess
America's stakes in the region.

Washington

Kennedy admits to Senator Mansfield (and others) in February
that he has come around to Mansfield's view and intends to
withdraw the U.S.  commitment to Diem, but not until after
his own re-election in 1964.  The reason for his delayed
response to Mansfield's advice: abandoning Vietnam to the
Communists in 1963, after virtually abandoning Laos under the
guise "neutralism" in the Laos Accords the previous year,
would cost him re-election.

Vung Tau, a resort on the South China Sea

A new factor enters the equation, as 25,000 Buddhists
converge for the dedication of a new statue of the Buddha.
Vietnamese Buddhism was one of the few factors of social
cohesion that survived the French colonial intervention.  Not
surprisingly, therefore, it re-emerged as a vehicle of
nationalism, a harbinger of hope for national renewal.  Diem
himself had sensed this political potential and, despite his
own family's three-hundred-year tradition of Catholicism, had
meticulously cultivated the Buddhist revival.  In the nine
years of his rule, Diem had constructed 1,200 new pagodas and
rebuilt 1,200 more.

Though far from a majority of Vietnamese, the four million
Buddhists were a significant segment of the population of 14
million.  They outnumbered Catholics almost three to one
(there were 1.5 million Catholics).  The government of South
Vietnam could ignore such a constituency only at its peril.
Opposition forces, looking to unseat Diem, had at hand a
ready-made vanguard of revolution.  Hue

Tri Quang, a successful lawyer who had turned to a life of
religious devotion by entering a Buddhist monastery in 1958,
emerges once more to public life on May 8, 1963, at the
annual observance of the Buddha's birthday.  He turns the
second day of the festival into a protest against religious
persecution, seizing the radio station to broadcast his
indictment of Diem.  Government security forces, seeking to
restore order, enter a melee in which seven people are killed
by an explosion.

Saigon

Tri Quang is now a resident of the Xa Loi Pagoda in Saigon.
On the morning of June 11, several monks from this pagoda
drive to a busy downtown intersection in the company of an
elderly monk, Quang Duc, and abet his efforts to burn himself
alive.  Aimed at the liberal sentiments of the White House,
the monk's sacrifice captures the sympathies of the American
people for the "majority" religion of Vietnam, Buddhism,
allegedly suffering repression by the Catholic president.
(Later official U.S.  analysis would estimate the activist
segment of the Buddhist community at 400,000.)

Tri Quang, sensing the vulnerability of a Catholic President
in a Protestant nation caught supporting a Catholic president
in a Buddhist nation, decides to press his case in the court
of public opinion.  Summoning an American journalist, Tri
Quang urges her to tell Kennedy to abandon Diem.  "If he does
not, he will see ten .  .  .  forty .  .  .  fifty bonzes
burning."

Dublin

President Kennedy, while basking in the nostalgia of his
triumphal presidential tour of Ireland, signals his solution
to the Buddhist question in Vietnam.  On June 27, he
announces the replacement of the U.S.  Ambassador in Saigon,
Fritz Nolting-known to be sympathetic to Diem-by Henry Cabot
Lodge, his old political rival.

Lodge had been mentioned to Kennedy for the post of
ambassador by Dean Rusk, to whom Lodge had personally
proposed this assignment. Seeking perhaps to insulate himself
from partisan attack over his evolving policies in Southeast
Asia, Kennedy chose Lodge despite vigorous staff protest.  He
was a politician who would be able to handle the press, who
were increasingly becoming principal actors in the unfolding
drama in Saigon.  Hanoi

Ho Chi Minh signals a willingness to compromise with Diem on
Vietnam's future.  Through the Polish member of the
International Control Commission, Mieczyslaw Maneli, Ho sends
a message that Diem will not be challenged as head of a
southern government in a federated Vietnam.  He adds a
personal greeting: "Shake his hand for me.  Diem is a patriot
in his own way."

To a journalist, Wilfred Burchett, Ho announces that he is
open to the possibility of a ceasefire, in hopes of driving a
wedge between Diem and Kennedy.

Saigon

On August 7, Diem welcomes to his palace a sympathetic
American journalist, Marguerite Higgins of the New York
Herald Tribune, for an interview.  Diem asks: "What am I to
think of the American government?  Am I merely a puppet on
Washington's string?  If you order Vietnam around like a
puppet on a string, how will you be different from the
French?  I hope that your government will take a good look at
these generals plotting to take my place.  There are no
George Washingtons among our military.

"The key to good relations between the United States and
Vietnam, whether it is governed by me or those who come after
me [a refrain in Diem's long discourse], is respect for the
substance of sovereignty.  The newer independence is, the
more passionate is the people's attachment to it."

Washington

Harriman, Forrestal, and Hilsman interrupt a rare Saturday
golf outing of George Ball (Acting Secretary of State in
Rusk's absence).  Harriman insists that a cable from the
newly arrived Ambassador Lodge in Saigon requires an
immediate reply.  Ball cables Lodge to order Diem to remove
his brother, Nhu, from government, on penalty of a U.S.
search for an alternative government.  The cable requires
Lodge to meet personally with Diem to explain this new
policy.

Saigon

On August 25, Lodge, declining to meet Diem, orders CIA Chief
of Station John Richardson to proceed directly to step two of
the plan, alerting the generals that Washington has given the
green light for a coup.

Lodge, quickly discovering that there are neither George
Washingtons nor Benedict Arnolds among the Saigon generals,
turns in desperation to the colonels.  This change of rank
involves an indefinite delay in the change of government.

Washington

Diem's Buddhist emissary to the UN General Assembly, Prince
Buu Hoi, calls on Harriman and Hilsman to parry their call
for "pluralism" in Vietnam.  Seeking to initiate them into
the mysteries of Buddhist pluralism, Buu Hoi presents a
letter from Thich Tran Khiet, the leader of Vietnamese
Buddhism, in which Thich Tran Khiet deplored Tri Quang's
politicization of the Buddhist heritage.  Early in their
meeting, Harriman yanks the hearing aid from his ear, a
nervous gesture he often displays in the presence of Asians.

The next day, General Taylor and Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara report back to Kennedy on the new fact-finding
mission he has sent them on.  They accept Lodge's view that
it is too late to reform Diem, and argue against calling off
the coup.  They also agree to the policy change demanded by
the plotters: suspension of U.S.  assistance to Nhu's special
forces under Colonel Le Quang Tung.  When word reaches Saigon
of this cutoff, the colonels choose the day for their coup,
the Feast of All Saints (November 1).

Saigon

Diem summons Tran Van Dihn, recently returned from the
embassy in Washington, to issue instructions for his new
assignment as ambassador in New Delhi.  Tran is to await
there the arrival of a high official from Hanoi to discuss
further the proposals of a Vietnamese federation that Ho Chi
Minh had broached in July. Cautioning his ambassador against
unwarranted optimism, Diem is unable to conceal his own.

Saigon, All Saints Day

The coup duly took place.  Diem, offered asylum ,(along with
Tri Quang, who had taken refuge in the U.S.  Embassy in late
August), preferred death to dishonor.  After a final
prayerful vigil, he and his brother Nhu assisted at their
last Mass, the commemoration of all the faithful departed.
He rose to meet his fate, was handcuffed, thrown into an
armored personnel carrier, shot in the head, and dumped into
a cemetery facing the embassy.

This did not, however, still the voice of Tri Quang, the
American oracle of Vietnamese Buddhism.  Between 1963 and
1966, his principal religious function was to preside at the
obsequies of the eight military governments that sprang from
Lodge's scheme to bring Vietnam into the twentieth century.
His impartial demonstrations against all these successor
governments ended with his imprisonment in 1966.

John Kennedy's legacy to Vietnam was a set of dominoes.  The
dominoes were those eight military governments that briefly
succeeded Diem, each standing precariously after a coup, then
toppling in turn.

To his own countrymen the young President left a debt, the
debt-not unreasonably-felt by U.S. government officials who
had conspired to remove Diem from office.  Having installed a
government by force, Washington could find no decent way to
disown it.  Thus the Johnson Administration was drawn
ineluctably into the Saigon vortex.  Instability was
Kennedy's legacy to South Vietnam. Instability in Saigon bred
inflexibility in Washington.

At one point in this saga, Ambassador Galbraith-using a
phrase that he later admitted had attracted him more by its
sound than by its sensesaid to President Kennedy, "Nothing
succeeds like successors." At the time of Diem's
assassination, 98 Americans had died in Vietnam.

Title:       Present at the construction. (Berlin Wall)
             (column)

Authors:     Sidey, Hugh
Citation:    Time, Nov 20, 1989 v134 n21 p33(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Cold War_History
             Berlin Wall_History

People:      Kennedy, John F._Foreign relations

Reference #: A8110413

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1989

All summer long John Kennedy had brooded, waiting for Nikita
Khrushchev to make good on his threat to get rid of "the bone
in my throat" -- partitioned Berlin. But he had not
anticipated what would happen on that warm August afternoon
in 1961 when he set out from Hyannis Port, Mass., on the
yacht Marlin loaded with family and his favorite picnic dish,
fish chowder.

When the flash came from Washington that the Wall was going
up, the Army major on duty became so agitated that he walked
into the surf in full uniform to deliver the bulletin to
Brigadier General Chester Clifton, the President's military
aide, who was swimming just offshore.

Clifton signaled the Marlin back and handed Kennedy the terse
message. "You all go ahead," J.F.K. told his family. "I won't
be out." He climbed into a golf cart with Clifton and in
silence rode to his house. "Why in hell didn't we know about
it?" he blurted, not expecting an answer. "What can we do?"
he asked, turning to Clifton. "What can the military do?"
Clifton told him that out of some 40 contingency plans for
Berlin, he could not recall a single one dealing with a wall
being built between the Soviet and Allied sectors.  In fact,
there was not much he could do.

Later, in the Oval Office, he sighed that the Wall would stay
until the Soviets tired of it. "We could have sent tanks over
and knocked the Wall down," he mused. "What then?  They build
another one back a hundred yards?  We knock that down, then
we go to war?"

When Kennedy did see the Wall, the event became one of the
great spectacles of the cold war, his speech one of the most
memorable in his presidency.  When Kennedy flew into Berlin
that June morning, he had a text that did not please him.
"You think this is any good?" he asked the U.S. Berlin
commander, Major General James Polk, who had joined the
Kennedy caravan.  Polk scanned the speech and replied
bluntly, "I think it is terrible." Kennedy agreed and began
to write a new one. But before he taunted the builders of the
Wall, he rode four hours through the streets of West Berlin
in the midst of a human fury of adoration intensified by the
city's constant isolation. Nothing before in Kennedy's
exuberant political life had approached this demonstration of
between 1 million and 2 million cheering, roaring Germans.

At Checkpoint Charlie he asked that family members and other
guests not climb up to the viewing stand.  Mouth set, Kennedy
studied the strange, gray emptiness before him.  Then, in far
windows in East Berlin apartments, three women appeared
waving handkerchiefs. "Isn't that kind of dangerous?"
wondered Kennedy.  Yes, he was told.  Kennedy stood several
seconds in tribute to those tiny figures.

The crowd that waited for him to speak in front of West
Berlin's city hall occupied every foot of the square and all
the connecting streets.  Kennedy raised his jaw and chopped
the air with his hand, his voice growing ragged as he shouted
his challenges to the other world and answered with his
famous refrain, "Let them come to Berlin." In that moment the
tribute Kennedy gave to those people was as honorably held,
as profoundly pure as anything he had ever said.  It was made
of truth and given to history. "Ich bin ein Berliner."

CAPTION: J.F.K. staring into the strange, gray emptiness

Title:       Secrets from the J.F.K. years. (Michael
             Beschloss book 'The Crisis Years', a book on
             John F. Kennedy administration)

Authors:     Ellis, David
Citation:    Time, May 6, 1991 v137 n18 p17(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    The Crisis Year (Book)_Criticism,
               interpretation, etc.

People:      Beschloss, Michael_Authorship;  Kennedy, John
             F._Foreign relations;  Khrushchev,
             Nikita_Foreign relations

Reference #: A10662770

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1991

Despite their cliffhanging confrontations, John F. Kennedy
and Nikita Khrushchev were faithful pen pals.  The Crisis
Years (HarperCollins), a new book on the Kennedy
Administration by historian Michael Beschloss, discloses the
contents of 80 secret messages between the U.S. and Soviet
leaders on subjects ranging from the Berlin Wall to Vietnam.
In his research, Beschloss discovered why the correspondence
came to an abrupt end six weeks before Kennedy's death:
because of a bureaucratic misunderstanding, the State
Department failed to send a crucial Kennedy response to
Khrushchev's peace proposals.

The book, due in June, describes Kennedy's elaborate White
House taping system.  Secret Service agents put microphones
in the mansion's library, presidential bedroom telephone,
Oval Office and Cabinet Room.  The author provides excerpts
from now public transcripts of meetings during the Cuban
missile crisis.  Kennedy's tentative behavior on the tapes of
initial meetings, writes Beschloss, does "not quite bear out
later claims . . . that this was a President superbly in
command of the crisis from the start."

Title:       They just don't get him: three decades after
             J.F.K.'s death, Generation X ponders his
             mystique. (John Kennedy)

Authors:     Reeves, Richard
Citation:    Time, Nov 22, 1993 v142 n22 p62(2)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Conflict of generations_Analysis
             Nineteen-sixties decade_History

People:      Kennedy, John F._Public opinion

Reference #: A14554792

=============================================================

Abstract: Most post-boomers, who are too young to remember
          Pres Kennedy, seem to have a respect and awe for
          the optimism he represented even though the mass
          media has emphasized Kennedy's negative qualities
          recently. Kennedy could inspire individuals to
          participate in social change.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1993

She was three years old on Nov. 22, 1963. "I knew it was the
most important thing ever," she said to me, recalling the day
John F. Kennedy died. "My mother was crying. I had never seen
an adult cry." Now a graduate student in government at the
University of Texas, she said she often thinks about that day
30 years ago. When I asked her what she thinks about Kennedy
now, she said she doesn't really know much about him. Yet she
shares with other young people a sense of loss and anger
about something they never got to know.

The post-baby boomers, who were born after the 1960
presidential campaign, seem to have no clear picture of the
man or his times. Camelot, the myth created by his wife and
court after the assassination, means almost nothing to them.
The political revisionism that followed, portraying Kennedy
as a self-serving cold warrior, means little more to them
because they know almost nothing of the history that was
being so energetically revised.

The newest Kennedy myth is even further from reality than the
first two. Devastated baby boomers and conspiracy peddlers
seem to have put young Americans in a mysterious, alluring
haze. The question I heard most often at universities was
this: "What was it that J. Edgar Hoover had on Kennedy, so
that he could never be fired at the FBI?"

When the editors of the Harvard Crimson asked me that
question, I answered, "In 1960 J. Edgar Hoover was the most
admired man in the U.S. He saved us from John Dillinger and
Hitler, and now he was rounding up the dirty commies. Kennedy
didn't even get 50% of the vote. He would have been nuts to
fire Hoover."

The silence that followed was either polite or because they
thought I came from another planet. Which of course I did.

In America, a nation that believes it transcends history,
each generation can be a world of its own. We each have our
own vision of Kennedy. The World War II veterans who were
Kennedy's contemporaries. Me, who was in college when he was
elected. Bill Clinton and the other baby boomers, who were in
high school. The kids at Harvard and the University of Texas.

A baby boomer who teaches political science at the Austin
campus said in a seminar that she felt she knew almost
everything about Kennedy, from the big mistakes in governing
to the big womanizing -- a word that bespeaks evil to
generations sensitive to feminism. And yet when she hears the
name or thinks about the man, "I just melt."

That was a brave thing to say in a roomful of presidential
scholars. But other men and women in the room nodded, a bit
rueful. Many Americans feel that way, I believe, because
Kennedy passed the great test of democratic leadership: he
brought out the best in most of his people most of the time.

Whatever one thinks of the political record or the political
man, John Kennedy was a surpassing cultural figure -- an
artist, like Picasso, who changed the way people looked at
things. Kennedy painted with words and images and other
people's lives, squeezing people and perceptions like tubes
of paint, gently or brutally, changing millions of lives. He
focused Americans in the directions that truly mattered --
toward active citizenship, toward the joy of life itself.

The most important thing about Kennedy was not any great
political decision, though he made some, but his own
political ambition. He did not wait his turn. He directly
challenged the political system he wanted to control,
understanding that the most important qualification for the
most powerful job in the world was wanting it. After him, no
one else wanted to wait either -- neither young Negroes in
Nashville, Tennessee, nor young charmers in Arkansas -- and
few institutions were rigid enough or flexible enough to
survive. When he was asked early in 1960 why he thought he
should be President, he answered, "I look around me at the
others in the race, and I say to myself, `Well, if they think
they can do it, why not me?' Why not me? That's the answer.
And I think it's enough."

For those who lived during his times, Kennedy seemed to be
the beginning of the new, though perhaps he was just the end
of the old. The U.S. was beginning to burst its seams
economically, technologically, culturally. When Kennedy took
office, the American economy was growing at a little more
than 2% a year. By the end of 1963, the growth rate was
nearly 6%. He came to office in the days of carbon paper,
mimeograph machines and flashbulbs. Three years later, jet
airliners, interstate highways, direct long-distance
telephone dialing, and Polaroid cameras were speeding up
people and life. New things and words were appearing almost
every day: ZIP codes, Weight Watchers, Valium, transistors,
computers, lasers, the Pill, LSD.

In 1963 Lawrence of Arabia won the Academy Award as best
film, but another nominated picture seemed to move America
more, To Kill a Mockingbird, about race and justice and hope
in the South. The music of young Americans was changing from
perky love songs to stuff of a different romance. If I Had a
Hammer and Blowin' in the Wind were melodic calls for justice
and freedom all over this world. America was rich, and its
wealth was shared by many millions. A lot of this was new,
and people did not quite know what to do with it or how to
act. But the Kennedys would show them! The young and restless
rich, well educated and well mannered, gaily presiding over
the White House, the world really. Watching the Kennedys was
educational, teaching that most American of endeavors:
self-improvement.

That was the way we were. But why do our children and their
children care about all this? The extraordinary thing is not
what each of us remembers or believes, but that everyone
remembers or cares at all.

"We know all the bad stuff," said one of the Harvard
twentysomethings with typical anger. "But Kennedy represents
good things that we never got to share. It doesn't seem fair
that there was optimism then. He symbolizes idealism and
service, an era when people could do things. When things got
done."

"Look at MTV and this election," he said. "The slogans they
used were Kennedy: `ROCK THE VOTE!' `CHOOSE OR LOSE!' We want
our Kennedy too."

CAPTION: Each generation has its own vision of Kennedy
because he passed the test of democratic leadership: he
brought out the best in most of his people most of the time

Title:       The most vividly recalled U.S. president: why
             Canada wept. (the assassination of former U.S.
             President John F. Kennedy) (Special Report)

Authors:     Lynch, Charles
Citation:    Maclean's, Nov 22, 1993 v106 n47 p51(2)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Canada_Relations with the United States
             United States_Relations with Canada

People:      Kennedy, John F._Public opinion

Locations:   Canada;  United States

Reference #: A14593012

=============================================================

Abstract: Many Canadians have fond memories of former Pres
          Kennedy and were saddened when he was assassinated
          in Dallas, TX, on Nov 22, 1963. Kennedy's maternal
          relatives had lived in New Brunswick before moving
          to the US. Kennedy helped to establish warm
          relations between the US and Canada.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Maclean Hunter (Canada) 1993

Two United States presidents have meant as much to Canadians
as to Americans. It may be that both were more popular in
Canada than in their homeland. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the
first, John F. Kennedy the second and most vividly remembered
of the two, though his achievements were minuscule beside
FDR's.

Canada's prolonged love affairs with these two men may have
been rooted in the fact that Down East Canadians knew them
both before they became the most powerful leaders in the
world--Roosevelt through his ties with Campobello, N.B.,
Kennedy as the complete Bostonian, harking back to the days
when ``the Boston States'' meant more to Maritimers than
Montreal, Toronto or points west.

When Kennedy grew up in Massachusetts, one in five families
there had roots in the Atlantic provinces. Kennedy's maternal
ancestors, the Fitzgeralds, landed from Ireland in New
Brunswick before moving on to Boston. To this day, Saint John
calls itself the most Irish city in Canada, a smaller version
of the Massachusetts capital.

Jack Kennedy himself came to Fredericton at the invitation of
the chancellor of the University of New Brunswick, Lord
Beaverbrook. It was 1957, and Kennedy was introduced by
Beaverbrook as ``the next president of the United States.''
Kennedy responded with what came to be known as the ``good
fences make good neighbors'' speech.

So Canada wept, too, when Kennedy was shot. It may be that
had he lived and become engulfed in failure, as all
subsequent presidents except Ronald Reagan have been, the
reaction to him would have turned sour long since, and there
would be no honoring his anniversaries. Vietnam might have
sunk him as it did his successor. Today's media would have
finished him, on his private peccadillos alone.

But he fulfilled one of the prime conditions for remembrance,
be it fair or foul, by dying young. And dying spectacularly,
with controversy thrown in that bubbles and boils with
mystery to this day.

My youngest daughter was in her Grade 5 classroom in an
Ottawa school the day Kennedy was shot, and the teachers
wheeled in a TV set so the kids could watch history being
made, something they would remember all their lives. And they
have, more vividly than they remember any of our prime
ministers, even the Kennedy-esque Pierre Trudeau. More than
they remember our prime minister of the day, Lester Pearson,
whom Kennedy admired above all Canadians, as intensely as he
despised Pearson's predecessor, John Diefenbaker.

My own experience on the day of Kennedy's assassination was
unique, in that I was led to believe it was either Pearson or
Diefenbaker who had been shot. I was in Jakarta on a
round-the-world journalistic junket and had arranged an
interview with the Indonesian dictator Sukarno, at his
mountain retreat in Bogor.

During the drive up-country, the Indonesian conducting
officer turned to me and said, ``Your leader has been shot.''

Startled, I said: ``Lester Pearson shot?''

The man shook his head.

``John Diefenbaker?'' I blurted.

The name ``John'' must have rung a bell, because the man
nodded assent, and I spent the rest of the 100-km drive
mourning Dief, and wondering who could have shot him, and
why.

It was only on arrival in Bogor that I found the Sukarno
cabinet assembled, hailing Kennedy's death as a victory for
freedom (the Red Chinese also celebrated it as a bright day),
and pondering whether Sukarno should go to Washington for the
funeral. The answer was no and my interview was cancelled. I
asked to be taken back to Jakarta, where the only refuge from
the festive reaction to Kennedy's death was the United States
Embassy. So I went there, and joined in the shedding of
tears.

My first sight of Kennedy had been at the Los Angeles
Democratic convention that nominated him for the presidency
in a bitter fight with Lyndon Johnson. It was a close-run
thing, as was the subsequent election against Richard Nixon,
and to be near to it was to know how important the Kennedy
money was, and how hungry for power was Kennedy's younger
brother, Bobby. Without Bobby, there would have been no
Kennedy in the White House, and yet watching him I developed
a dislike that lasted until he, too, fell to an assassin's
bullet. The recruiting of Johnson as vice-presidential
candidate, and the marketing of Jack and Jackie as the
dawning of a new age for America, overcame the public
prejudice against a Roman Catholic, and cancelled the
momentum of the popular presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, the
hero of the Second World War.

Kennedy ran as a war hero, too, and the voters fell for it.
Even in Canada, where we put down our own war heroes, we
liked Ike, and even named our most famous mountain after him,
though the name didn't stick and it reverted to Castle
Mountain. Our mountain named for Kennedy, in the Yukon, has
had better luck.

Canadians were no strangers to Roman Catholics in office,
though religious prejudices were as deep here as in most of
the United States. But there, the election of a Roman
Catholic president was revolutionary, and it got Kennedy off
to a roaring start with echoes of hope and renewal heard
around the world.

The Canadian connection was special, from the time Kennedy
came to Ottawa on his first foreign visit as president and
aggravated his old wartime back injury planting a tree in the
grounds of Government House. Diefenbaker took an instant
dislike to ``the young whippersnapper,'' and it was
heightened when Kennedy addressed Parliament and called on
Canada to accept her responsibilities and join the
Organization of American States. Diefenbaker regarded it as a
command to ``jump through the hoop,'' and said no.

The best anecdote on the Diefenbaker-Kennedy feud followed
the discovery of a White House working paper in an East Block
wastebasket, the paper listing the things the United States
should ``push'' Canada to do. Diefenbaker kept the paper as a
reminder to resist all pressure from Washington. The legend
is that Kennedy had scribbled in the margin: ``What do we do
with the s.o.b. now?'' Kennedy subsequently denied it,
reportedly saying he couldn't have called Diefenbaker an
s.o.b. when he didn't know he was one at the time.

His opinion jelled during the Cuban missile crisis, the
globe's closest brush with a Third World War. Canada was part
of the North American Air Defence Agreement, along with the
United States. Washington deemed that Soviet missiles on
Cuban bases were a threat to continental security and put its
forces on combat alert, expecting Canada to do likewise.
Diefenbaker said no. Canadian defence minister Douglas
Harkness sided with Kennedy and ordered a partial alert of
Canadian forces, without informing Diefenbaker. The result
was a split in the Canada-U.S. defence alliance that would
not be healed as long as either Diefenbaker or Kennedy
remained in office.

Diefenbaker, with a shove from Kennedy, was the first to go.

Things came to a head in the Canadian election of 1963, when
a key issue was whether Canada was committed to taking U.S.
nuclear warheads for Bomarc anti-aircraft missiles,
Diefenbaker saying no, Lester Pearson saying yes. Kennedy
backed Pearson, and a letter was circulated from U.S.
ambassador Walton Butterworth congratulating Pearson on his
nuclear stand (the stand that caused Trudeau to call Pearson
``the unfrocked prince of peace.'')

Pearson won the election and ordered an investigation that
led to the Butterworth letter being branded a forgery.
Diefenbaker dubbed Butterworth ``Butterballs'' and kept
copies of the ``forgery'' handy for the rest of his life.

Kennedy's influence in the 1963 Canadian election may have
swung the balance, because pro-U.S. feeling was strong here
and Kennedy was more popular with Canadians than any
homegrown leader.

Pearson's grappling with the English-French question was
reminiscent of Kennedy's approach to racial divisions in the
United States, though both problems remain 30 years later.
And there were traces of Kennedy in Dalton Camp's campaign to
unseat Diefenbaker as Conservative leader in 1967. Camp
enlisted the youth wing of the party in his cause and it has
always been my belief that he aimed for the leadership
himself, believing he could rouse the same emotions in Canada
that Kennedy had. But Diefenbaker was too tough for Camp &
Co. to swallow, and though they unseated him they had to
settle for Robert Stanfield as his successor. Diefenbaker's
farewell speech to the parliamentary press gallery included
what must have been the toughest attack ever voiced by a
Canadian prime minister about a U.S. president, and
Diefenbaker carried the Kennedy grudge to his grave, leaving
subsequent PMs to grapple with the ups and downs of relations
with the United States.

Stanfield was billed as ``the man with the winning way,'' but
the trouble was he was a slow mover--and what there was of
the Kennedy magic in the northern air moved to the Liberals
and Pierre Trudeau. The story of Trudeaumania is one of the
strangest and most unlikely in Canadian political history,
but much of the flair displayed so suddenly by this shy,
introverted man was on the Kennedy pattern, including the
sexy side that was totally new, happening right in the open
with women of all ages throwing themselves at his feet.

Part of the Kennedy inheritance was to complete the swing of
Canada's attention from British politics to American. The
Second World War and FDR had led Canada away from British
ways to a perceived role as honest broker between London and
Washington. With Kennedy, Washington became predominant in
Canadian foreign and even domestic affairs, and has remained
so ever since.

Like Pierre Trudeau, he haunts us still. His memory
diminished the presidencies of all who followed him, just as
the memory of Trudeau has taken its toll of Joe Clark, John
Turner, Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell, and casts a shadow
over the prime ministry of Jean Chr*tien. It is Pierre and
Maggie that we remember, just as we remember Jack and Jackie,
almost as though the brave new world they promised actually
had come to pass.

It didn't in either country, but in a cold climate, the
memories stay warm, along with the expectations that there
must be a better way of doing politics.

Charles Lynch retired a decade ago as chief of Southam News
and is now an Ottawa-based freelance columnist, author and
broadcaster.

Title:       Minority report. (correspondence with Judith K.
             Exner) (Column)

Authors:     Hitchens, Christopher
Citation:    The Nation, April 4, 1994 v258 n13 p440(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

People:      Exner Judith K._Records and correspondence;
             Kennedy, John F._Public opinion

Reference #: A14973050

=============================================================

Abstract: A letter from Judith Exner, and a reply to that
          letter, are presented. Exner, who allegedly had a
          relationship with Pres John F. Kennedy and served
          as a go-between with Sam Giancana, objects to the
          characterization of 'gun moll.' The reply urges
          Exner to make her papers public.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1994

I "must say that a person gets a good class of correspondence
in this business. Allow me to share with you a fax that
arrived from Newport Beach, California, just the other day:

Dear Mr. Hitchens:

I was watching Brian Lamb's show on Cable News Network [sic]
yesterday when I heard you refer to me as a "gun moll." This
is a highly offensive misrepresentation of me which I hope
you will not repeat.

The facts concerning my family background, as well as my
lengthy relationship with Jack Kennedy, were set forth in the
April 1990 issue of Vanity Fair. As the article illustrates,
my dealings with Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli occurred
only because Jack Kennedy asked me to serve as a go-between.
My two-month relationship with Sam Giancana, which occurred
after my relationship with Jack Kennedy had ended, and which
was so brief that the FBI never even noticed it, should not
be used as the defining moment of my life. I doubt that you
would like to be forever known for what you did for two
months over 30 years ago.

I will take responsibility for my own actions, but not for
those of Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana. My contacts with Sam
Giancana and Johnny Rosselli during my relationship with Jack
Kennedy were solely on Jack's behalf. Also, my contacts with
Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli afterward were a direct
result of the FBI harassment I suffered due to J. Edgar
Hoover's interest in maintaining leverage over Jack and Bobby
Kennedy.

In addition to reviewing the Vanity Fair article, I also
recommend that you watch my interview with Larry King in
February 1991. I think you will see that you have a mistaken
impression of who I am.

You may respond to this letter through my FOIA attorney,
James H. Lesar, Esquire, 918 F Street N.W., Suite 509,
Washington, DC 20004.

Sincerely,

Judith K. Exner

To which I have responded as follows:

Dear Ms. Exner,

It was good of you to write. I prefer to reply directly,
rather than through the offices of a lawyer who appears to be
named after a men's magazine. May I begin by making a
suggestion? I have a baby daughter who is 5 months old.
Everybody says she looks just like me. I prefer not to think
that in saying this the witnesses affirm that I am toothless,
bald, incontinent, greedy, drooling and solipsistic.
Extending the analogy, may I ask whether, when you hear the
words "gun moll" on television, you make the automatic
assumption that the reference must be to yourself? The point
is of more than passing interest, because I did not utter
your name on the air, and also because we currently have a
President who yearns to be compared to the late John F.
Kennedy. When he does hear the comparison, are we to take it
that he relishes being compared to a relentless adulterer who
had a back-channel to organized crime? I leave the question
with you.

Turning now to the Vanity Fair article, which you recommend
as factually pristine. (I know from my own experience that
the magazine has a meticulous legal and fact-checking
department.) I draw your attention to the following
paragraphs of the piece:
  For two years, she'd been seeing Sam on behalf of the
  president of the United States, she says, carrying
  envelopes,
  arranging their meetings .... She knew it was screwy--the
  gangsters protecting her from the G-men. But Sam treated
  her
  like a lady and the F.B.I. treated her like a tramp. The
  agents followed her, hissing, "Hey, Judy, come here." Sam
  sent a dozen yellow roses every day. [Emphasis in the
  original.]

In view of this, do you still say that "the FBI never even
noticed" your friendship with Mr. Giancana? You do state that
your actual contacts with him, and with another Mafia leader,
were undertaken at the instigation of President Kennedy. In
your book, you produced White House telephone numbers and
other classified materials that substantiated your claim (to
the shock and dismay of Benjamin Bradlee and other Kennedy
confidants). If you were smart enough to keep these pieces of
life insurance, were you not bright enough to work out what
line of business Messrs. Giancana and Rosselli were pursuing?

So, never mind about the "gun moll" bit, which I'll agree was
on the cheap side even if I did keep your name out of it.
(Actually, both your names, since you were originally famous
as Judith Campbell.) Here is another extract from the Vanity
Fair article that you recommend:
  A March 15, 1962, memo reveals that the Feds were not
  unaware of her relations with the commander-in-chief. An
  interview between an agent and a private detective in
  L.A. produced this observation: "He [the detective] then
  made
  the statement that Campbell is the girl who was 'shacking
  up
  with John Kennedy in the East.'"

I hardly like to say this, but you do invite the thought. It
is as "President's moll" rather than as "gun moll" that you
pique the curiosity. At some stage in the early 1960s, in
other words, the boyish patron of the Green Berets and the
Peace Corps made a simultaneous foreign-policy alliance with
the Cosa Nostra. The consequences are with us still. Mr.
Kennedy remains a veritable Siegfried to many ignorant
liberals. Any further light that you can throw on this would
be a service to what remains of our democratic republic. Even
Oliver Stone might dry his eyes, and others would open their
own. Since you are evidently misremembering even your own
story, why not instruct that attorney to make all your papers
public and, so to speak, clear the air? You could then claim
the private life that would be rightfully yours.

I apologize for the unavoidable gender-specificity of this
communication.

Sincerely,

Christopher Hitchens

Title:       Department releases Kennedy-Khrushchev
             correspondence in Cuban missile crisis. (John F.
             Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev) (Department of State
             spokesperson Margaret Tutwiler statement)
             (Transcript)
Citation:    US Department of State Dispatch, Jan 13, 1992 v3
             n2 p29(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962_History

People:      Kennedy, John F._Records and correspondence;
             Khrushchev, Nikita_Records and correspondence

Reference #: A11826668

=============================================================

Abstract: The State Department and Russia are jointly
          releasing all Kennedy-Khrushchev correspondence on
          the Cuban missile crisis. A list of the
          declassified correspondence is included.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT U.S. Government Printing Office 1992

The Department is today declassifying and releasing the
remaining pieces of correspondence between President Kennedy
and Soviet General Secretary Khrushchev relating to the Cuban
missile crisis.  The Russian Government is taking the same
action, and a similar announcement is being made in Moscow.

The United States and Russia have also agreed to publish
jointly all Kennedy-Khrushchev correspondence related to the
Cuban missile crisis.  We are discussing details of the joint
publication, which we expect to be accomplished this year.
For the United States, the correspondence will be published
by the United States Information Agency as a special issue of
its publication Problems of Communism.  This will include
both English and Russian texts, plus scholarly commentary.

Release by the United States and the Russian federation of
these letters comes at a time of dramatic change, when
fundamentally new relations are developing between the United
States and Russia.  These documents, which involve critical
high-level exchanges at the height of the Cold War, which is
now behind us, will be of interest to historians and scholars
as well as to the general public.  The Department is pleased
to be able to work with the Russian federation to make the
complete historical record of this correspondence available
publicly.

The correspondence declassified and released today is:

* Letter from General Secretary Khrushchev to President
Kennedy dated October 30, 1962 (unofficial translation);

* Letter from President Kennedy to General Secretary
Khrushchev dated November 3, 1962 (US original text);

* Letter from General Secretary Khrushchev to President
Kennedy dated November 4, 1962 (unofficial translation).

* Letter from General Secretary Khrushchev to President
Kennedy dated November 12, 1962 (unofficial translation);

* Oral message from President Kennedy to General Secretary
Khrushchev dated November 12, 1962 (unofficial English
translation provided by the Russians);

* Letter from General Secretary Khrushchev to President
Kennedy dated November 14, 1962 (unofficial translation);

* Letter from President Kennedy to General Secretary
Khrushchev dated November 15, 1962 (US original text);

* Oral message from President Kennedy to General Secretary
Khrushchev dated November 20, 1962 (unofficial English
translation provided by the Russians);

* Letter from General Secretary Khrushchev to President
Kennedy dated November 20, 1962 (unofficial translation);

* Letter from General Secretary Khrushchev to President
Kennedy dated November 22, 1962 (unofficial translation);

* Letter from General Secretary Khrushchev to President
Kennedy dated December 10, 1962 (unofficial translation); and

* Letter from President Kennedy to General Secretary
Khrushchev dated December 14, 1962 (US original text).

Title:       New look at an old failure; an ex-CIA historian
             fights to air his version of the Bay of Pigs.
             (Jack Pfeiffer)

Authors:     Peterzell, Jay
Citation:    Time, June 1, 1987 v129 p29(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Freedom of information_Cases
             United States. Central Intelligence
               Agency_Officials and employees
             Bay of Pigs_Military aspects
             United States_Relations with Cuba

People:      Kennedy, John F._Military policy;  Pfeiffer,
             Jack_Cases

Locations:   Cuba;  United States

Reference #: A4856155

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1987

New Look at an Old Failure An ex-CIA historian fights to air
his version of the Bay of Pigs

As the nation picks through the wreckage of the Iran-contra
affair for lessons, a dispute is brewing within the
intelligence community that could throw new light on the
granddaddy of all covert-action fiascos: the Bay of Pigs.
The CIA's former chief historian, Jack Pfeiffer, is suing to
force the release of his detailed and still classified
studies on the invasion, which challenge the conventional
historical wisdom about why it failed.

Previous historians have tended to place most of the blame on
the CIA's deputy director for planning, Richard Bissell.  His
penchant for secrecy, they say, led him to keep the agency's
intelligence division and other military analysts pretty much
in the dark, thus resulting in a poor assessment of the risks
involved. Indeed, a still secret case study prepared for the
Tower commission, one of a series that sought to compare
previous covert activities with the Iran-contra affair, also
attri butes the Bay of Pigs failure to excessive secrecy of
CIA planners and lack of adequate review by intelligence
experts.

In fact, Pfeiffer argues, a series of meetings and memos
shows that senior officials of the CIA's intelligence
division and Pentagon planners were briefed at all stages of
the discussion. According to Pfeiffer, the conventional view
casting Bissell as the villain of the tale is reflected in a
damning report by the CIA's inspector general at the time,
Lyman Kirkpatrick.  Although Kirkpatrick, 70, who resigned
from the CIA in 1965, ordered the destruction of all the
records on which his report was based, Pfeiffer managed to
uncover the material.  He says it led him to conclude that
Kirkpatrick had deliberately skewed the report to discredit
Bissell, who was his rivalfor the position of CIA director.

Kirkpatrick defends his original assessment. ''Bissell was
running it ((with a group)) that was cut off from everyone
who should have assessed the plan.'' Denying that his
conclusions were based on personal rivalry, Kirkpatrick
argues, ''Bissell and I were friends.'' Bissell, 77, who was
eased out of the agency in 1962 and until now has never
publicly defended his role, comments dryly, ''That's not the
case.''

In his view, and that of Historian Pfeiffer, the reason that
theBay of Pigs failed was not because the machinery of
Government was short-circuited.  Rather, it was a case in
which the entire system worked the way it was supposed to --
and produced a fiasco.

The newly elected President, John Kennedy, was adamant about
notinvolving American forces.  Indeed, he insisted on hiding
any evidence of American support for the exile army.  For
that reason the White House decided to cancel crucial air
strikes and change the site of the landing from the town of
Trinidad, at the foot of the central mountains, to the
quieter venue of the Bay of Pigs.  It was these decisions,
Pfeiffer argues, rather than a faulty process of
consultations, that doomed the operation from the start.

The Navy was ready in case Kennedy decided to lift his ban on
direct U.S. involvement, Bissell revealed in his interview
with TIME.  As the Cuban exiles went ashore that moonless
night in April 1961, a force of about 1,500 Marines waited on
a ship near the coast.  Admiral Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval
Operations at the time, confirms this previously unreported
deployment.  The Marines were ''available,'' says Burke, now
85. ''These things are just a general military precaution.''

After 25 years, Pfeiffer thinks it is time for his own
studies of the fiasco to be made public. ''Kirkpatrick's
order to destroy the documents was outrageous,'' he commented
last week. ''What's to say the CIA's records on the
Iran-contra matter won't disappear the same way?''

Title:       Kennedy, Vietnam, and Oliver Stone's big lie.
             (John F. Kennedy)

Authors:     Loebs, Bruce
Citation:    USA Today (Magazine), May 1993 v121 n2576 p88(4)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    JFK (Motion picture)_Criticism, interpretation,
               etc.

People:      Kennedy, John F._Military policy;  Stone,
             Oliver_Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Reference #: A13807584

=============================================================

Abstract: Oliver Stone's film 'JFK' charges that Kennedy was
          murdered by the military-industrial complex and
          government leaders because he planned to withdraw
          US troops from Vietnam. An analysis of Kennedy's
          Vietnam strategy that disputes this accusation is
          presented.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Society for the Advancement of Education
1993

By claiming that the President was assassinated to prevent
him from pulling U.S. troops out of the war, the movie "JFK"
distorted history for the sake of propaganda.

IN THE 1991 film, "JFK," director Oliver Stone's protagonist
Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) warns the audience that "Hitler
always said the bigger the lie, the more people will believe
it." Hypocritically, Stone then proceeds to practice Adolf
Hitler's "big lie" strategy in "JFK." He charges that the
military-industrial complex, including the FBI, CIA, and "the
nation's highest officials," with Vice-Pres. Lyndon Johnson's
"connivance," murdered Pres. John F. Kennedy to prevent him
from withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. The basic premise
on which this accusation hinges is false--Kennedy did not
plan to remove U.S. troops from Vietnam.

To support this motive for the assassination, Stone shows an
interview with Kennedy by Walter Cronkite on Sept. 2, 1963,
with the President saying, "We can help them; we can give
them equipment; we can send our men out there as advisers;
but they have to win it--the people of Vietnam against the
communists." However, Stone flagrantly distorts Kennedy's
words by expunging JFK's next comment to Cronkite: "But I
don't agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would
be a mistake. That would be a great mistake."

In alleging Kennedy's plan to withdraw from Vietnam, Stone
repeats a canard begun by Kenneth O'Donnell, the President's
appointments secretary, in a 1970 article in Life. To shield
him from blame for the Vietnam disaster, pro-Kennedy
historians, including William Manchester, Theodore Sorenson,
and John Newman, who advised Stone for "JFK," had described a
"plan" to withdraw from Vietnam.

A principal proponent of the withdrawal myth is historian
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., adviser, friend, and biographer of
John and Robert Kennedy. In a 1978 biography of Robert
Kennedy, Schlesinger cites private remarks JFK made in 1963
to Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson, Michael Forrestal,
Sen. Mike Mansfield, and O'Donnell about Vietnam and
concludes that Kennedy "left a formal plan, processed
successfully through the Pentagon, for a withdrawal of
American advisers by the end of 1965." Schlesinger even
contends that the tragedy of Vietnam might have been avoided
"if Kennedy had lived long enough to carry out his plan for
American withdrawal" in 1965. In a 1986 book, The Cycles of
American History, Schlesinger refers to "Kennedy's plan for a
complete withdrawal of American advisers from Vietnam by
1965--a plan canceled by Johnson a few months after [JFK was
assassinated in] Dallas."

Why, then, did Kennedy continue to order American troops to
Vietnam after supposedly deciding as early as July, 1962, to
remove all American forces in 1965? To this crucial question,
Schlesinger offers a bizarre rationalization. Quoting from
O'Donnell's book, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, he maintains
that, after deciding to withdraw, Kennedy told Mansfield,
"But I can't do it until 1965--after I'm reelected."
Schlesinger asserts that Kennedy told O'Donnell, "If I tried
to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have
another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it
after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I
am reelected."

Schlesinger wants us to believe that Kennedy decided in 1962
or early 1963 to withdraw all U.S. forces, but continued to
maintain troops in South Vietnam because he feared losing the
1964 election. The unavoidable conclusion from this tale is
grotesque. If Schlesinger is right, the President willfully
sacrificed American lives for political profit. During the
Kennedy Administration, 108 Americans died and 486 were
wounded in Vietnam, and these figures increased from the time
of his assassination in November, 1963, until November, 1964,
after the presidential election when Schlesinger maintains
Kennedy would have begun to withdraw U.S. troops.

Furthermore, if the Schlesinger-Stone thesis is correct,
Kennedy is responsible for the death of more than 58,000
Americans and millions of Southeast Asians. Had JFK withdrawn
U.S. forces in the spring of 1963, when Schlesinger claims he
decided to do so, but declined for political reasons, the
U.S. might not have become deeply involved in the Vietnam
War. Lyndon Johnson, who correctly believed he was following
his predecessor's policy in Southeast Asia, probably would
not have reintroduced military forces after Kennedy had
removed all U.S. troops.

Schlesinger's and Stone's allegation is wrong. Evidence does
not support their corruption of Kennedy's Vietnam record. The
thesis that JFK reached a firm decision to withdraw all U.S.
troops by 1965, regardless of the consequences in Vietnam, is
denied by Schlesinger's own source (the Pentagon Papers),
Kennedy's public statements, and the President's closest
advisers, including Robert Kennedy.

Schlesinger's evidence refutes his arguments. In criticizing
Norman Podhoretz's book, Why We Were in Vietnam, he writes.
"Mr. Podhoretz's research in the Pentagon Papers might have
led him to the plan for the phased withdrawal of American
military personnel in Vietnam by the end of 1965."

Although the Pentagon Papers analysis does reveal a
contingency plan to withdraw troops, the study shows clearly
that this was not irrevocable and was predicated on a
premature assumption made in July, 1962, which was corrected
later, that the Vietcong and North Vietnam would be defeated.
The Pentagon Papers analyst states that the withdrawal of
U.S. forces from Vietnam "was begun amid the euphoria and
optimism of July 1962 and was ended in the pessimism of March
1964." He continues, "only the micawberesque prediction could
have led decision-makers in Washington to believe that the
fight against the guerrillas would have clearly turned the
corner by FY '65."

According to the Pentagon Papers, the crucial condition that
corrected Kennedy's hasty prediction about victory in Vietnam
was the military overthrow of South Vietnam Pres. Ngo Dinh
Diem; his assassination on Nov. 1, 1963, three weeks before
Kennedy's death; and "the resulting political instability and
the deterioration of the military situation" which
immediately "led decision-makers to set aside this planning
process." After the Diem coup, writes the Pentagon analyst,
"all this planning [of a U.S. withdrawal] began to take on a
kind of absurd quality as the situation in Vietnam
deteriorated drastically and visibly. The phaseout policy was
overtaken by the sinking after-effects of the Diem coup." The
Pentagon analyst concludes that phased withdrawal "was
overtaken by events."

Thus, Schlesinger's source, the Pentagon Papers, contradicts
his assertion that JFK planned to withdraw all U.S. forces
from Vietnam by 1965. Furthermore, unless it is to be
believed that the President repeatedly lied to the American
people about Vietnam to conceal his "secret plan" to
withdraw, Kennedy's numerous public statements supporting
South Vietnam are compelling evidence that he opposed a
withdrawal.

In the 1950s, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy was one of the
leaders of the American Friends of Vietnam, an organization
described by co-founder Joseph Buttinger as a group of
liberal intellectuals who became "Diem's most effective
defenders." Kennedy was one of South Vietnam's strongest
champions. He told an American Friends of Vietnam convention
in 1956, "If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then
surely we are the godparents. This is our offspring. We
cannot abandon it; we cannot ignore its needs." After he
became president, Kennedy backed his strong personal
commitment to a non-communist South Vietnam by ordering
15,000 troops to aid that nation. To the very day he was
assassinated, Kennedy publicly pledged American support to
South Vietnam.

On Sept. 9, 1963, Kennedy explained to David Brinkley that he
believed in the domino theory in Southeast Asia. "I believe
it. I believe it," the President repeated and then expressed
his categorical opposition to withdrawing from Vietnam: "What
I am concerned about is that Americans will get impatient and
say because they don't like events in Southeast Asia or they
don't like the government in Saigon, that we should withdraw.
That only makes it easy for the communists. I think we should
stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we
can, but we should not withdraw." At a news conference on
Sept. 12, 1963, Kennedy emphasized that "what helps to win
the war we support. What interferes with the war effort we
oppose."

Understanding Kennedy's Vietnam Policy

Timing is crucial in understanding Kennedy's Vietnam policy.
His private statements about withdrawing U.S. troops were
made prior to the Diem assassination, after which, according
to the Pentagon Papers, "the phaseout policy was overtaken by
the sinking aftereffects of the Diem coup." When the
President mentioned withdrawal in 1963, he did so on the
assumption that the war would be won. As Robert Kennedy
indicated, "we were winning the war in 1962 and 1963. Up
until May or so in 1963, the situation was getting
progressively better. The situation began to deteriorate in
the spring of 1963."

On Oct. 11, 1963, JFK issued National Security Action
Memorandum 263, calling for a plan to accelerate the training
of the South Vietnamese army to allow American forces to
withdraw in 1965. However, NSAM 263 was not incontrovertible,
and the President made other contingency plans to increase
U.S. forces in Vietnam. According to Sorenson, Kennedy
"ordered the departments to be prepared for the introduction
of combat troops, should they prove to be necessary."

Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Special Military Representative to
President Kennedy, on whose on-site reports JFK based his
hope for a troop withdrawal, explains in Swords and
Plowshares that "the 1965 date was feasible only if the
political situation did not worsen and affect the military
effort, which it soon did, and if Diem carried out needed
internal reforms, which he did not."

On Oct. 31, 1963, the day before the Diem coup, Kennedy
carefully qualified his withdrawal memorandum, telling a
press conference, "It would be our hope to lessen the number
of Americans there by 1,000 as the training intensifies and
is carried on in South Vietnam."

Kennedy's "hope" for removing U.S. troops from Vietnam was
dashed by the Diem coup and, in the Pentagon Papers analyst's
words, "the resulting political instability and the
deterioration of the military situation." Consequently, at a
news conference on Nov. 14, eight days before his death, the
President conceded the unlikelihood of withdrawing 1,000
troops by December, thus setting aside his Oct. 11
memorandum. Kennedy was asked, "Mr. President, in view of the
changed situation in South Vietnam, do you still expect to
bring back 1,000 troops before the end of the year, or has
that figure been raised or lowered?" JFK hedged: "No, we are
going to be bringing back several hundred before the end of
the year, but I think on the question of the exact number I
thought we would wait until the meeting of November 20th."

That meeting, on which Kennedy said he would base his
decision for a troop withdrawal, took place in Hawaii between
U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge, Maxwell
Taylor, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and produced
a pessimistic report on military and political conditions in
South Vietnam. Lodge subsequently reported to the new
president, Lyndon Johnson, that "It was all bad in Vietnam,
that hard decisions were ahead and not far ahead."

Johnson's resolve to continue Kennedy's policies led him to
approve a small troop withdrawal in December, 1963, even
though he believed "it became increasingly questionable"
whether the withdrawal was based on "a valid assumption"
about conditions in South Vietnam. In fact, the Pentagon
Papers analyst argues that Kennedy would not have withdrawn
troops in December as Johnson did.

Kennedy endorsed U.S. military support to South Vietnam until
his death. On the morning of his murder, the President told
the Ft. Worth Chamber of Commerce, "without the United
States, South Vietnam would collapse overnight. I don't think
we are fatigued or tired. We are still the keystone in the
arch of freedom, and I think we will continue to do as we
have done in our past, our duty."

In his last prepared speech, which he was to deliver at the
Trade Mart in Dallas on Nov. 22, JFK pledged aid to nations
opposing "the ambitions of international communism." He
pointed out that "our assistance to these nations can be
painful, risky, and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia
today. But we dare not weary of the task." The President
identified nine nations, including Vietnam, that did not have
"the resources to maintain the forces" needed to resist "the
threat of communist aggression." Kennedy warned that he might
be required to send combat troops to Vietnam: "Reducing our
efforts to train, equip, and assist their armies can only
encourage communist penetration and require in time the
increased deployment of American combat forces." The
President closed that speech by boldly proclaiming, "We in
this country, in this generation--by destiny rather than
choice--are the watchmen on the wall of world freedom."

To believe Schlesinger and Stone, we must dismiss Kennedy's
strong public statements supporting South Vietnam and
conclude that he was one of the biggest liars in American
history. In rejecting Stone's withdrawal thesis, McGeorge
Bundy, JFK's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs,
states, "Kennedy didn't hide his views: his public statements
were what he believed."

Schlesinger's and Stone's contrived Vietnam withdrawal plan
is refuted by Schlesinger's own source, the Pentagon Papers,
by the words of Kennedy himself, and is denied emphatically
by JFK's closest advisers. Ted Sorenson, Special Assistant to
President Kennedy, often described as JFK's "alter ego,"
explains the Vietnam policy Kennedy held in November, 1963,
in his biography of the President: "He was simply going to
weather it out, a nasty, untidy mess to which there was no
other acceptable solution. Talk of abandoning so unstable an
ally and so costly a commitment ~only makes it easy for the
communists,' said the President, ~I think we should stay.'"

Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the BBC he doesn't believe
Kennedy planned to withdraw all American troops from Vietnam
after the 1964 election: "I had hundreds of talks with
President Kennedy about Vietnam and on no single occasion did
he ever express to me any ideas on that line." He adds that
"Kennedy never said anything like that to me, and we
discussed Vietnam--oh, I'd say hundreds of times. He never
said it, never suggested it, never hinted at it, and I simply
do not believe it." Rusk rejects on moral grounds
Schlesinger's callous claim that Kennedy sent Americans to
Vietnam for political reasons: "If he had decided in 1962 or
1963 that he would take the troops out after the election of
1964, sometime during 1965, then that would have been a
suggestion that he would leave Americans in uniform in a
combat situation for domestic political purposes, and no
President can do that."

What would Kennedy have done

The American public can not know what specific military
strategy Kennedy would have followed to meet the crisis in
Vietnam in late 1963 and 1964. In December, 1963, Robert
McNamara, following another inspection trip to Vietnam, told
Pres. Johnson, "the situation is very disturbing. Current
trends, unless reversed in the next two or three months, will
lead to neutralization at best and more likely to a communist
controlled state." In March, 1964, McNamara and Taylor
returned from South Vietnam to inform LBJ that conditions had
"unquestionably been growing worse." Later in 1964, ominous
developments changed the entire nature of the ground war in
South Vietnam. According to Mike Mansfield, who headed a
special Congressional delegation to Vietnam, "about the end
of 1964, North Vietnamese regular troops began to enter South
Vietnam" armed with the sophisticated AK-47 communist weapons
system.

To meet this crisis, would JFK have escalated U.S.
involvement in Vietnam in 1965? According to Robert Kennedy,
"we'd face that when we came to it. It didn't have to be
faced at that time." Given his longstanding determination to
aid South Vietnam, reaffirmed on the day of his death, Pres.
Kennedy probably would have met the growing emergency with
U.S. military force. According to Sorenson, JFK would "not
turn back from that commitment. He ordered the departments to
be prepared for the introduction of combat troops, should
they prove to be necessary."

Walter Rostow, one of Kennedy's advisers for national
security affairs, explains that, "had President Kennedy
lived, he would have been forced to follow the same course
toward escalation of the Vietnam War that President Johnson
did, and possibly would have done so earlier." Kennedy told
Rostow, "I've got to hold Southeast Asia come hell or high
water."

Significantly, Kennedy's principal foreign policy
advisers--Rusk, McNamara, Lodge, Taylor, and Rostow--were
retained by Lyndon Johnson. Firm in their recommendations to
Johnson to fight in Vietnam, would they have advised Kennedy
differently?

Convincing testimony against the Schlesinger-Stone withdrawal
thesis comes from Robert Kennedy, described by Schlesinger as
"his brother's total partner." Robert Kennedy frequently
expressed JFK's determination to stay in South Vietnam. Sent
by the President to Southeast Asia in 1962, he told a Saigon
news conference, "we are going to win in Vietnam. We will
remain here until we do win."

In May, 1964, six months after the President's death, Robert
Kennedy explained his brother's Vietnam policy in a private
interview with John Bartlow Martin for the oral history
program of the John F. Kennedy Library. He stated
unequivocally that the President did not plan to withdraw
troops from Vietnam: "The President felt that he had a
strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we
should win the war in Vietnam." Martin asked, "There was
never any consideration given to pulling out?" Kennedy
responded, "No." Martin asked, "But the President was
convinced that we had to stay in there?" Kennedy replied,
"Yes." Martin asked, "And we couldn't lose it?" Kennedy
answered, "Yes."

Without proof that John F. Kennedy planned to withdraw U.S.
troops from Vietnam, Stone's basic thesis in "JFK" collapses.
According to the Dec. 23, 1991, issue of Newsweek, "If there
was no clear sign that Kennedy was going to pull out of
Vietnam, there is no clear motive for Stone's grand
conspiracy to kill him."

In 1992, Richard Nixon bluntly discarded with an epithet
Stone's repugnant accusation that the U.S. government,
including Lyndon Johnson, killed Kennedy. If Stone's premise
is true--that the military-industrial complex would murder
presidents to prevent them from withdrawing U.S. forces from
Vietnam--these assassins killed the wrong president. Why
would they assassinate Kennedy, who had opposed withdrawal,
and spare Nixon, who, beginning in 1969, removed all 549,000
U.S. combat troops from Vietnam?

Stone's "JFK" can not be dismissed as a mere movie. Despite
his pious pronouncement in the film that "the truth is the
most important value we have," Stone instead follows Hitler's
maxim, as stated in Mein Kampf, that "the masses fall victim
more easily to a big lie than a small one," and, "even with
the explanation of the matter, the masses long hestiate and
vacillate and accept at least some ground as true.
Consequently, from the most bold lie something will remain."

It is clear that much will remain of Stone's big lie. Stone
is a brilliant propagandist, and his film is powerful and
persuasive. For many people, "JFK" will be the correct
account of the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy.

Title:       The disease J.F.K. tried to keep secret.
             (Addison's disease) (Brief Article)
Citation:    Time, Oct 19, 1992 v140 n16 p24(2)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Presidents_Health aspects
             Addison's disease_Diagnosis

People:      Kennedy, John F._Health aspects

Reference #: A12752805

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1992

TITLE: DISEASE J F K TRIED TO KEEP SECRET DOCTORS CONFIRM
RUMORS OF THE PRESIDENTS ADRENAL GLAND PROBLEMS

TITLE: WEEK HEALTH SCIENCE

During the 1960 presidential campaign, rumors surfaced that
candidate John F. Kennedy was suffering from Addison's
disease, an incurable, potentially fatal deterioration of the
adrenal glands.  If true, the information could have
influenced the outcome of what ended up being a very tight
election.  But Kennedy denied it, and the press, as it would
later do with other unsavory talk about the Kennedy clan, let
the matter rest.

Now an article in the Journal of the American Medical
Association has finally set the record straight.  According
to the author, Journal editor George Lundberg, one of the
pathologists who assisted at the President's 1963 autopsy has
confirmed that Kennedy's adrenal glands, which normally sit
atop the kidneys, were nowhere to be found.  Lundberg has
also confirmed that someone described only as "Case 3 . . . a
man 37 years of age," treated for Addison's disease in 1954
at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, was in
fact Kennedy.  Although Addison's is incurable, it is fully
treatable, and was in the 1950s.  But people are very touchy
about the health problems of potential Presidents.  If the
story had been confirmed 32 years ago, Richard Nixon might
have taken office a lot sooner.

Title:       Acknowledging the past. (Dallas creates John F.
             Kennedy exhibit)
Citation:    Time, Aug 31, 1987 v130 p23(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Historic sites_Texas
             Texas. School Book Depository_Exhibitions
             Dallas, Texas_Exhibitions

People:      Kennedy, John F._Exhibitions

Locations:   Dallas

Reference #: A5144263

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1987

American Notes DALLAS Acknowledging The Past

For many in Dallas, the Texas School Book Depository has been
a monument to the most shameful day in the city's history.
For years tourists have trekked to the red-brick building
where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed President
John F. Kennedy.  But the structure was closed to the public
until 1981, when it was declared a Texas historic site, and
visitors still are not allowed near Oswald's sixth-floor
sniper perch.  Now Dallas has decided to acknowledge the
continuing interest in the site.  The city's landmark
commission gave approval for a 60-ft. elevator tower that
will run to the building's sixth floor, where a historical
exhibit will detail the President's murder.  The $3 million
project is scheduled to open by the fall of 1988, the 25th
anniversary of the assassination. ''Dallas has come to terms
with worldwide curiosity,'' declared Dallas County Chief
Executive  Lee Jackson. ''We'll present the building to the
world and let people draw their own conclusions.''

Title:       Conspiracy to end conspiracies. (Oliver Stone's
             new film 'JFK')

Authors:     Bethell, Tom
Citation:    National Review, Dec 16, 1991 v43 n23 p48(3)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Presidents_Assassination
             Conspiracy_Portrayals, depictions, etc.
             New Orleans, Louisiana_Politics and government
             JFK (Motion picture)_Criticism, interpretation,
               etc.

People:      Stone, Oliver_Criticism, interpretation, etc.;
             Kennedy, John F._Crimes against;  Shaw,
             Clay_Cases;  Garrison, Jim_Public opinion

Locations:   New Orleans, Louisiana

Reference #: A11732977

=============================================================

Abstract: Oliver Stone challenges all sense of credibility
          with his new motion picture 'JFK.' His conspiracy
          theory of John F. Kennedy's assassination is
          blurred by the homage he pays to Jim Garrison and
          his relentless investigation of Clay Shaw based on
          his 'links' to anyone and everyone.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT National Review Inc. 1991

WHEN I HEARD Oliver Stone was delving into the mystery of the
Kennedy assassination and making a high-budget movie about
it, I felt a slight chill of apprehension. Would I be
unmasked as a CIA agent? A friend of mine, who has been in
regular contact with Stone in recent months, called me from
Los Angeles. I asked him if he thought I could reach Stone by
phone. Improbable, he said. Stone regarded me as a "serious
enemy," and would be unlikely to grant me an interview on
this subject or any other. I was relieved to learn that I was
not actually going to be in the movie (scheduled for
Christmas release). According to Robert Sam Anson's cover
story in Esquire, Stone "needs his enemies to do good work."
So I like to think that I may nonetheless have indirectly
made an artistic contribution to Stone's latest opus.

Just to clear this up: through a series of flukes too tedious
to relate, in the late fall of 1966 I found employment in
District Attorney Jim Garrison's then-secret investigation of
the Kennedy assassination. This meant going to Dallas, where
I proved to be quite hopeless as a detective; then to
Washington, D.C., where some English journalists taught me to
play poker and I spent enjoyable hours at the National
Archives perusing nonclassified records of the investigation
carried out by the FBI and Secret Service; then back to New
Orleans.

Jim Garrison is the hero of Stone's movie Kevin Costner plays
the role. Garrison himself, recently retired from the
Louisiana Court of Appeals, plays Earl Warren. Oliver Stone
told Anson that he saw Garrison as "somewhat like a Jimmy
Stewart character in an old Capra movie." Garrison is
depicted as the truth-seeking official who bucks the
establishment and presses forward against powerful, shadowy
enemies. That's not my recollection of life in Garrison's
office, however. The truth is that a quite hilarious movie
could with accuracy have been made about the Garrison
investigation. But that would hardly be Stone's style. At his
best, Garrison did have a wonderful sense of humor. Most of
the time, however, he lived in a strange world of his own
imagination-which he sometimes confused with the real world.
His most striking characteristic as DA was a truly astounding
recklessness and irresponsibility.

We were an oddly assorted team. Among my fellow investigators
was Mort Sahl, the satirist, who really did have credentials
issued by the DA's office, and was in fact fondly regarded at
Garrison's HQ at Tulane and Broad. Unlike many other people
who came to help out, Sahl didn't cause trouble for us by
feeding Garrison's bizarre fantasies. Sahl, too, could be
marvelously funny, and I do look back fondly on some very
entertaining evenings with him, Garrison, a former FBI agent
named Bill Turner, and one or two others.

Another and rather more somber gumshoe was a man known to us
all as Bill Boxley, a stocky, grizzle-haired fellow, in
demeanor very much the insurance-claims adjuster, with his
ever-present briefcase and an air of diligent, sober
appraisal. In fact, he told me that he was a reformed
alcoholic, and I recall him sitting through many an evening,
listening poker-faced to Garrison's fantastic soliloquies,
drinking endless coffee and smoking cigarettes. Boxley had
told Garrison that his real name was William Wood and that he
had worked for the CIA in the 1950s. "Garrison started to
make accusations about CIA involvement in the Kennedy
assassination shortly after he hired Boxley to work on the
case," I wrote over twenty years ago in an unpublished, still
classified (by me) manuscript about the case. (The time is
still not right for its release, I fear.)

BY DECEMBER 1968, however, Garrison's staff was beginning to
tire of filing mischievous charges and subpoenaing unknown
individuals all over the country-netting Garrison headlines,
but leaving in their wake a stream of courtroom
embarrassments for his lawyers to clean up. Boxley would have
to go, Garrison's aides felt, and to achieve this they
persuaded the boss that Boxley was not merely a former but a
current CIA employee-and working actively to undermine his
case by feeding him false leads. Garrison's chief trial
lawyer, James Alcock, told me at the time: "I don't believe
Boxley was an [active] agent, but he was giving Jim
[Garrison] so much bull we had to get rid of him somehow."
Poor old Boxley must have felt terribly let down. It's true
that he led Garrison astray but he did so out of bad
judgment, not perfidy. He certainly wasn't secretly plotting
against Garrison with shadowy figures in Langley, Virginia.

The big test for Jim Garrison came early in 1969, with the
trial of a New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw. He had
been charged with conspiring to assassinate Kennedy, along
with Lee Harvey Oswald and an Eastern Air Lines pilot called
David Ferrie. Ferrie himself had died (of a cerebral
hemorrhage, the coroner ruled) a few days after news of
Garrison's investigation was published in the New Orleans
States-Item, on February 22, 1967. It's worth noting that
there was great jubilation in Garrison's office when Ferrie
so fortuitously died. The news of Garrison's investigation
had generated worldwide publicity, and now his leading
suspect was dead. The staff felt that this was a golden
opportunity for Garrison to get out while he was ahead:

Declare sadly that he had tried to find the truth but that
Ferrie had mysteriously died. The assistant DAs and various
police investigators working for Garrison assumed that the
boss would quietly close down the investigation.

Instead Garrison forged ahead recklessly, charging Clay Shaw
with plotting the assassination of the century. Everyone in
Garrison's office knew that the case against Shaw was an
embarrassment. The principal witness, Perry Russo, who
claimed he had seen Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald at a party
discussing an assassination, was not credible, and his story
was soon exposed by Jim Phelan in the Saturday Evening Post.

Nearly two years elapsed between the indictment and trial of
Shaw. In that time Garrison would frequently reassure the
staff that the trial would never take place. He was confident
that Shaw, like Ferrie before him, would die unexpectedly, or
perhaps that the Federal Government would close us down
permanently, or that something drastic would intervene. The
rest of us weren't quite so optimistic. The dreaded trial
date kept approaching, and I remember Jim Alcock gloomily
saying one day that "we're looking at a directed verdict."
(In which the judge concludes that there is so little
evidence that he directs the jury to acquit the defendant.)

Imagine the pleasure, then, when one day an accountant in New
York contacted the office and told us he was prepared to
testify that he had been at a party in New Orleans in 1963,
and there had heard Ferrie and Shaw talking about killing
Kennedy. His name was Charles Spiesel. Two lawyers were
promptly dispatched to New York to interview the man.

On his return to New Orleans, one of them said of Spiesel:
"Well, he'd make a great witness, but he' crazy." How crazy?
"He fingerprints his children in the morning to make sure
that the Federal Government hasn't substituted dead ringers
in the middle of the night." Oh, that kind of crazy. But then
again . . . apart from that . . . his demeanor was normal, he
held down a good job, he did professional work. (Lingering in
the air was the unstated question: Would defense counsel
think to ask a surprise witness, Do you fingerprint your
children?)

Later I found out that they really were planning to use
Spiesel as a witness against Shaw. There is no "discovery"
law in Louisiana, meaning that the prosecution can put
surprise witnesses on the stand at the last minute, without
having to warn defense counsel. I knew Clay Shaw was
innocent; in fact I think everyone in the DA's office also
knew it, except for Garrison himself-who was incapable of
thinking straight on the subject. For me, this was not an
easy time. It seemed that the only result of my interest in
the Kennedy assassination was going to be to help convict an
innocent man of the crime. Earlier, I had met one of Clay
Shaw's lawyers socially. Now I decided to help him, and so I
transmitted to him a memo I had written, listing the names
and addresses of those who would testify against Shaw, also
summarizing their testimony (but nothing about their
backgrounds or oddities of character).

I also told Garrison what I had done, before the Shaw trial
began. In retrospect, especially in view of later testimony
linking Garrison to organized crime, I may have been lucky to
get out of there alive. (I always liked Garrison, though, and
I think he knew that.) Anyway, the trial began, and I was
later told that the private investigator's report on Spiesel,
flown in from New York, only just arrived in time for the
cross examination: he was already on the witness stand.
Spiesel's background did come out. On the stand, he
cheerfully estimated that he had been hypnotized against his
will fifty or sixty times by secret enemies. Shaw was
acquitted, the jury deliberating for less than an hour.

Great secrecy has surrounded the Stone movie, but various
assassination buffs and reporters have acquired copies of the
script. One who did so was George Lardner Jr. of the
Washington Post. He reports that the character in the movie
who leaks the witness list to Shaw's lawyers is William
Boxley. With the trial about to begin an aide says to
Garrison: "He [Boxley] is working for the Federal Government.
It means they have everything, Jim.  All our witnesses, our
strategy for the trial." Lardner adds: "This serves as the
excuse for the disastrous testimony of Charles Spiesel.  He
was one of Boxley's witnesses, chief,' the Stone script
quotes one of Garrison's prosecutors as saying. 'I'm sorry.
He was totally sane when we talked."'

No, he wasn't. And Spiesel wasn't one of Boxley's witnesses,
either. Nor was Boxley working for the feds. Why, then, is
Boxley given this unflattering role in the movie, when I
might have more appropriately been cast in the role? Boxley
smoked too many cigarettes, and in 1980 died of emphysema. He
can't sue. Was I working for the feds, or MI-6, or whatever?
No, but I would guess Stone thinks otherwise.

Since learning that I was probably on Stone's enemies list, I
have taken the trouble to see some of his movies (Born on the
Fourth of July, The Doors, Wall Street). Even when one
disagrees with the political point of view expressed-and his
movies are intensely political-they strike me as being well
made and eminently "watchable." I am told by someone who has
seen parts of JFK that the Dealey Plaza scenes in Dallas are
brilliantly reconstructed, and include footage from the home
movie filmed by Abraham Zapruder. This shows Kennedy being
thrown violently backward as he is hit in the head by a rifle
bullet. Oswald and the Texas School Book Depository, of
course, were behind the presidential limousine. Watching that
sequence, one finds it very hard to believe that Oswald fired
the fatal shot. About 56 per cent of Americans believe that
Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy. I imagine
that number will increase after this film is released.

WAS THERE a conspiracy? Unexpectedly, I find myself more
suspicious of the Warren Commission's "lone gunman" finding
than I was when I last wrote about this subject (in the
midSeventies). Oswald must have been (at the least) involved
in the assassination, however, and it is counterproductive to
argue, as Jim Garrison does, that Oswald was  "totally,
unequivocally, completely innocent." If so, why did Garrison
charge Shaw with conspiring with an innocent man? If an
innocent Oswald was framed, as some think, it was certainly
very obliging of him to show up for work on the morning of
November 22 carrying a package of  "curtain rods."

Still, Oswald's background is certainly very peculiar and
doesn't fit the "lone assassin" profile. He worked as a radar
technician at a U-2 base in Japan, later defecting to the
Soviet Union. The U-2 spy plane was shot down while he was
there, and the pilot, Gary Powers, later said that Oswald
could have provided crucial information about its operation
to the Soviet authorities.

It's very hard to believe (as alleged) that the intelligence
agencies were not interested in such a person on his return
to the United States. Oswald's association with the
mysterious Count George de Mohrenschildt in Dallas in 1962-63
raises many questions about intelligence links. (De
Mohrenschildt wrote to Garrison and offered to help, but
Garrison showed no interest and as far as I know never
responded.)

Likewise, Oswald's employment by a firm where
government-classified photographs were analyzed, his
knowledge of "microdots," his visit to the Dallas FBI office
a few days before the assassination, the note that he left
there that was destroyed on the day of the assassination, his
odd visit to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City in September
1963, his puzzling association with Cubans in New Orleans
that summer (Garrison never got to the bottom of that), the
(anti-Castro) 544 Camp Street" address on some of the
pro-Castro literature Oswald was handing out in New Orleans
(again, never cleared up by Garrison), and a number of other
points, not to mention the physical and ballistic evidence in
Dallas, are more than sufficient to explain why there is
still a lot of interest in this baffling subject. The House
Committee's 1979 conclusion that President Kennedy "probably
was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy" does not strike
me as being entirely wrongheaded. It's a puzzle where the
pieces just don't fit together properly and people are going
to continue trying to reassemble them.

Shaping up in the news media has been something close to a
"Stop Oliver Stone" campaign. It's interesting that this
righteous wrath was never aroused by his earlier
anti-Vietnam-War or decadence-celebrating movies. Anson
mentioned Stone's "lengthening list of opponents, which
unites foes who've been fighting over the Kennedy
assassination for decades." Stone, he writes, has been
accused of "sullying the memory of a martyred President; of
recklessness and irresponsibility, mendacity and McCarthyism,
paranoia and dementia-even of treason."

It's enough to engender a certain sympathy for the man. It
does strike me that if the Vietnam War is fair game for
revisionism, so is the Kennedy assassination. Just so long as
we remember that Clay Shaw and I had nothing to do with it.

Title:       What if Oswald had stood trial? A riveting
             courtroom drama based on the Kennedy
             assassination. (simulated trial of Lee Harvey
             Oswald televised)

Authors:     Zoglin, Richard
Citation:    Time, Dec 1, 1986 v128 p60(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald (television
               program)_Criticism, interpretation, etc.
             Mock trials_Portrayals, depictions, etc.
             Trials_Drama

People:      Bunton, Lucius_Performances;  Spence,
             Gerry_Performances;  Bugliosi, Vincent
             T._Performances;  Oswald, Lee
             Harvey_Investigations;  Kennedy, John
             F._Assassination

Reference #: A4539308

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1986

Twenty-three years after the fatal shots rang out in Dallas,
questions about the assassination of John F. Kennedy still
reverberate.  The 1964 Warren Report concluded that Lee
Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot the President from the
Texas School Book Depository.  But 15 years later, the House
Select Committee on Assassinations, while agreeing that
Oswald was the murderer, decided he was most probably part of
a conspiracy.  Though some of the evidence leading to that
finding has been discredited, conspiracy theories continue to
proliferate, tracing the crime to everything from a Mafia
cabal to the CIA.

Now an extraordinary television trial has tried to shed some
light on the controversy.  In On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald, a
two- part, 5 1/2-hour program that de buted on Showtime last
weekend and will be repeated several times in upcoming weeks,
the case against Oswald is argued for the first time in a
courtroom setting under the rules of courtroom evidence.
Real witnesses are exam- ined by real attorneys, and the
testimony is evaluated by a jury.  The verdict: guilty of
murder.  Polled on a separate question, the jury decided by a
majority vote that Oswald was the sole assassin.

This unique experiment in reality programming was conceived
by London Weekend Television, which staged a mock trial of
Richard III for British TV in 1984.  Looking for another
historical crime to ''try'' on TV, the producers turned to
the Kennedy assassination. Unlike earlier fictional
treatments like the 1977 ABC movie The Trial of Lee Harvey
Oswald, the program has no script and (except for extras)
uses no actors.  Two prominent attorneys were enlisted to
argue the case.  For the prosecution: Vincent Bugliosi, 52,
the former Los Angeles deputy district attorney who
prosecuted Charles Manson.  For the defense: Gerry Spence,
57, who successfully represented Karen Silkwood's family in a
suit against the Kerr-McGee Corp.  Lucius Bunton, 61, a U.S.
district judge from Texas, was selected to preside, and a
jury was chosen from the Dallas jury rolls. (Oswald is
represented by an empty chair.) All of them were flown to
London for the three-day taping, which resulted in 18 hours
of testimony; Showtime, the program's co-producer, plans to
air the full-length version next year.

The program's research staff spent 18 months tracking down
some four dozen witnesses, 21 of whom appear in the TV trial.
Those testifying for the prosecution range from experts in
pathology and ballistics to former Oswald acquaintances like
Buell Wesley Frazier, who drove him to work on the day of the
assassination.  The defense witnesses include Dr.  Cyril
Wecht, a pathologist, who argues that a single bullet could
not (as the official version states) have struck both Kennedy
and Texas Governor John Connally, and others who give
evidence sugesting that Oswald was the patsy in a conspiracy,
possibly involving Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby.  The trial
includes a detailed examination of the famous film taken by
Abraham Za pruder, including the horrific frames in which the
President's head literally explodes from a gunshot.

Though most of the witnesses have testified previously, they
have never before faced cross- examination.  Both attorneys
are persuasive advocates.  Bugliosi deflates some of the more
outlandish conspiracy theories with rapid-fire probes.
Spence, a drawling, flamboyant courtroom performer, homes in
shrewdly on ambiguities and unanswered questions in the
official account.

Some questions seem rather conclusively settled.  The
Zapruder film, for ex ample, shows Kennedy lurching backward
after the shot to his head, implying that the bullet came
from somewhere in front of the car.  But the medical evidence
leaves no doubt that both shots came from the rear; as one
expert explains, the backward lurch could have been caused by
an involuntary neuromuscular reaction to the devastating
bullet.

Other testimony has the drama of the unfathomable.  Perhaps
most compelling is the appearance of Ruth Paine, the school
psychologist with whom Oswald's wife Marina lived before the
assassina- tion. Holding up bravely under Spence's prickly
cross-examination, she describes Oswald's actions before the
assassination in articulate but quavering words.

Paine: It's important that people understand that Lee was a
very ordinary person, that people can kill a President
without that being something that shows on them in advance.

Spence: Is it really your purpose to try to defame this man
in some way?

Paine: I think it's really important for history that a full
picture of the man be seen.

Spence: Yes, so do I.

The show-biz demands of television do some damage to the
program's credibility.  Because it is not a real trial,
witnesses could not be subpoenaed (Marina Oswald was among
the few who refused to appear).  The lawyers agreed to adhere
to a time limit on questioning, and the number of witnesses
was streamlined.  Complained Spence after the taping: ''All
kinds of inadmissible hearsay got into evidence, necessitated
by the fact that this was a three-day trial instead of a
three-month trial.''

Nevertheless, the participants contend, the program
contributes importantly to the assassination record. ''I defy
anyone who is familiar with the Kennedy assassi nation,''
says Bugliosi, ''to look at the 18 hours of tape or examine
the trial transcript and say that the gut issues of the case
were not addressed or were treated cosmeti cally.'' Even for
casual observers raised on Perry Mason, On Trial: Lee Harvey
Oswald provides a fascinating lesson in history and the law.
And, not incidentally, TV's best courtroom drama ever.

Title:       Remembering Dallas. (assassination of John F.
             Kennedy; American Survey)
Citation:    The Economist, Nov 26, 1988 v309 n7578 p25(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Assassination_Analysis

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination;  Oswald, Lee
             Harvey_Evaluation

Reference #: A6850020

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Economist Newspaper Ltd. (England) 1988

WASHINGTON, DC When Lee Harvey Oswald's bullet (for his it
was, without a doubt) tore into President john Kennedy's
brain on November 22 1963 on a street in Dallas, the
Washington correspondent of The Economist wrote of the
country having been "shocked half out of its wits". The
shock, having run a subterranean course these 25 years, has
raised its head in full force at the anniversary, as the
blast of coverage by print, radio and above all television
(for the assassination was a huge television event) appears
to witness.

The outpouring is full of perplexity. People feel that the
nation suffered a loss not to be measured by Kennedy's modest
legislative,  political and diplomatic achievements. The
feeling is not baseless: there was about the Kennedy
presidency a class, a style, a youthfulness, a grace and wit
and imagination that are not quantifiable. These things were
felt not only in America, but around the world, where the
outpouring of distress at the assassination was unexampled.

Matters are made no better by the difficulty that the public
still has in accepting the official interpretation of the
event, arrived at in 1964 by the Warren Commission over which
the chief justice of the United States, Earl Warren,
presided. The commission concluded that the assassination did
not result from any conspiracy, but was carried out by Oswald
acting alone; that the three shots fired were his, and
President Kennedy and Governor john Connally of Texas (who
was wounded) were struck by bullets from only one direction;
that police carelessness then allowed jack Ruby, a night-club
owner with Mafia connections, to kill Oswald, but that Ruby,
too, was acting for nobody but himself.

The public questioning of these conclusions will not be
silent. A poll taken jointly by the New York Times and CBS
News last month indicated that only 13% of the persons
questioned believed Oswald was acting alone, while 66%
believed there was a conspiracy. That people kill each other
for no reason is common knowledge, but there is still a basic
implausibility about it. Committee has followed committee,
book has followed book, facts have been piled up in vast
numbers, but gaps remain and analysts pick at them.

A contributory factor is that in the turbulence of the event,
some of the procedures followed were imperfect. Even before
the assassination, the staff people accompanying President
Kennedy and Vice-President Lyndon johnson felt themselves in
a hostile place. Kennedy himself said, when about to leave
Fort Worth for Dallas on his last morning, "We're headed into
nut country now." When he was pronounced dead, the
overwhelming impulse of his entourage was to carry his body
back to Washington in the utmost haste. About the only calm
ones seem to have been Mrs Kennedy, whose deportment was
flawless through the whole sequence from murder to state
funeral, and Vice-President johnson, firmly imposing order on
the transfer of office.

Bullets and bits of lead were collected without precise
documentation. Whether the same bullet could have killed
Kennedy and wounded Mr Connally is argued about to this day.
The remonstrations of local officials, that such procedures
as autopsy and inquest ought to be carried out in the county
where the death had occurred, were violently brushed aside.

The autopsy performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital was
described on a Nova telecast, shown on many public television
stations in the past week, as deficient in several important
respects. The same programme aired the unexplained question
of why the body arrived for autopsy in a different coffin and
a different bag from those in which it left the Dallas
hospital. What became of Kennedy's damaged brain nobody seems
to know.

The dissenters, or some of them, are trying to show that the
corpse may have been tampered with in order to support one
theory and discredit another. Since the Warren report
appeared, several commission members have complained that,
out of deference to Kennedy family wishes, they were not
allowed to see the autopsy and x-ray photographs, but had to
be content with hearing the conclusions of the medical
witnesses.

Theories of conspiracy and suppression of evidence did not
command such a ready hearing in 1963 as they do today, when a
string of deceptions, cover-ups, scandals and fiascos has
worn public confidence ragged. Some disclosures of the
intervening period have fed scepticism about the Warren
Commission's work. It came out in the 1970s that the Central
Intelligence Agency mounted a whole series of assassination
plots against Mr Fidel Castro between 1960 and 1965, thus
providing him with a motive for acting against President
Kennedy (which, so far as anybody knows, he did not do).

The CIA did not disclose this fact to the Warren Commission,
even though one of the commission's members, Allen Dulles,
had been director of the CIA until 1961. Similarly the
Federal Bureau of Investigation waited until 1975 to come up
with information about small transactions which it had with
Oswald and with Ruby that the commission would have been glad
to get in 1963.

The assassination literature flourishes. Mr David Belin, the
Des Moines lawyer who was a counsel to the Warren Commission,
is about to publish his book "Final Disclosure". He will
maintain that the commission was right. "The Great
Expectations of john Connally", by james Reston, junior, will
come out next year. He will recall Oswald's grievance against
Governor Connally, arising from the time when Mr Connally was
secretary of the navy and Oswald was stripped of his
honourable discharge from the marine corps. Mr Reston's
conclusion, unless he changes his mind, will be that it was
not the president, but Governor Connally, whom Oswald was out
to kill.

Title:       A shattering afternoon in Dallas. (Kennedy
             Assassination special section)

Authors:     Sidey, Hugh
Citation:    Time, Nov 28, 1988 v132 n22 p45(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Assassination_Influence
             Presidents_Assassination

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A6832222

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1988

Assassination was impossible.  John Kennedy, with Jackie
beside him in her raspberry pink suit, was too young, too
exuberant to fall.  The Secret Service, snooping beneath
manhole covers, scanning for hostile eyes, was invincible.
There would be no darkness on this bright day in Dallas.

How fragile our myths, how fleeting certainty.

Perhaps we knew when the first sound reached the press bus
behind Kennedy's limousine.  A distant crack,  another.  A
pause, and another crack.  Something was dangerously off-key.

Bob Pierpoint of CBS stood up, and our eyes met for ever so
tiny an instant.  We knew but did not want to believe. ''What
was that?'' he asked.  Doug Kiker, now of NBC, then a
reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, was typing on his
lap.  He paused.  Kennedy's limousine had turned the corner
beneath a boxy, ugly building and sunk out of sight.  The
pigeons -- the famous pigeons of death -- were rising and
swooping under the trees.

Pierpoint stood still for a couple more seconds, Kiker pecked
a time or two.  Three seconds, four.  Then reality rushed
with terrifying clarity down that short street beneath the
Texas School Book Depository.  We were never the same, nor
was the world.

The story at the core was the stuff of everyday American
violence.  A killer and a city street and a wild ride to an
emergency room and a young body too broken to repair.  But it
was Camelot and this was John Kennedy, and television now
rushed in to make the dreadful event an epic.

Madness descended.  Motorcycle cops jumped curbs, machines
roaring over the grass in a ballet of aimless panic.  The
crowd on the grassy knoll looked like it had been swept with
a giant scythe.  The street was empty, a stark, lifeless slab
of concrete that smelled of disaster.  Kennedy's motorcade
had been chopped in two like a luckless centipede, the front
end blown to God knew where, the rear end writhing and
thrashing.

The presidential limousine rested at Parkland Hospital.  A
grim young man was washing away the blood and flesh that had
splattered the leather upholstery.  The sight was shattering.
The red roses given to Jackie were still in the car --
crushed, broken.  The young man in his neat dark suit,
sleeves pushed up, swabbed the seats. They glistened in their
miserable wetness.  Beside the car was a bucket with brownish
red water.  If any doubt remained about this calamity, it was
swept away in one glance at that bucket.  So simple, so
hideous.

The nurses' classroom at Parkland became a vortex of the
world's clamor for information.  Each word from that tiny
point of a suburban hospital was flung across continents.

Two priests left the hospital, silent, sagging.  Their duty
was plainly over, whatever it had been.  Asked if Kennedy was
dead or alive, they remained silent for a few seconds.  Then
one of them blurted the terrible truth: ''He's dead, all
right.'' The four words were carried back to the temporary
pressroom, then exploded around the world.

The tragedy enlarged through the afternoon.  First had come
the awareness of the death of a man, a friend, a father and a
husband. Then numbed nerves began to grapple with the fact
that the Government too was brain-dead for the moment.  There
was the sense of a beast in convulsion at Parkland.  Police
rushed here and there. Vehicles circled, darted.  A small
coterie with Vice President Lyndon Johnson . . .  No, try it
again.  A small coterie with President Lyndon Johnson dashed
for Love Field and Air Force One.  A piece of lead weighing
less than an ounce had blown away a single mind, and history
had been halted in its tracks, pushed back a generation, then
hesitantly restarted, but in a different direction.

Tragedy picks out its participants without regard for
position or prestige.  Press secretary Pierre Salinger was
flying to Japan with a Cabinet delegation, so Malcolm
Kilduff, his deputy, became the link between the trauma room
at Parkland and the world beyond.  On a torn fragment of
paper, he crafted in a few short sentences the message that
would sadden the globe. ''President John F. Kennedy died . .
.''

As newsmen shouted, Kilduff sought out an empty room with a
friend.  The scrap of paper with its devastating message
quivered like a leaf in his fingers.  He lighted a cigarette.
Then something broke. ''I saw that man's head,'' he sobbed.
''I couldn't believe it.  I nearly died.  Oh, my God.  Oh, my
God.''

At noon John Kennedy had grinned and waved back as the cheers
cascaded down the Dallas streets.  Two hours later what was
left of him re-entered the public domain on the loading dock
of Parkland Hospital. ''I can't stand it,'' muttered one of
the journalists watching. ''Like dirty laundry out the back
door.'' Jackie carried what dignity was left.  Face stained,
clothes marked with dried blood, eyes straight ahead, hand on
the bronze casket as it was wheeled down the ramp.  Several
aides walked beside Jackie.  The whole bright prospect of
their new world shaped by their friend and leader had been
vaporized in an instant by Oswald.

Jackie was helped into the white hearse to ride with
Kennedy's body to Air Force One.  Everything about the scene
was small and colorless -- casket salesman, disheveled
reporters, unpainted concrete, exhaust fumes, arguing police
and security men, traffic grinding by on a freeway.

The new Government formed in the fuselage of Air Force One,
yet another ritual that mocked dignity.  But it was, perhaps,
that magnificent plane that began to reclaim the majesty of
the presidency.  With the body of Kennedy onboard, the new
President invested formally, Colonel James Swindal taxied his
plane out on the emptied runway of Love Field.  The ship
paused in lonely splendor, then lifted off into a blue sky,
clean and beautiful even in that mournful flight.

Title:       Did the mob kill J.F.K? (Kennedy Assassination
             special section)

Authors:     Magnuson, Ed
Citation:    Time, Nov 28, 1988 v132 n22 p42(3)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Assassination_Investigations
             Presidents_Assassination
             Organized crime_Investigations

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A6832182

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1988

Some portentous voices out of the underworld a
quarter-century ago:

''Kennedy's not going to make it to the ((1964)) election --
he's going to be hit.''

        -- Santo Trafficante, the top Florida mobster, to an
FBI informer in August 1962.

''You know what they say in Sicily: if you want to kill a
dog, you don't cut off the tail, you cut off the head.''

        -- Carlos Marcello, Mafia boss in New Orleans, to an
acquaintance that same month,

explaining why President John Kennedy, not Attorney General
Robert Kennedy, would be killed.

''There is a price on the President's head.  Somebody will
kill Kennedy when he comes down South.''

        -- Bernard Tregle, a New Orleans restaurant owner
allegedly associated with Marcello,

within hearing of one of his employees in April 1963.

Out of the mouths of such sinister characters the
assassination-conspiracy theorists of the 1980s have
fashioned the latest in a long-running series of explanations
of what may forever remain unexplainable: why Lee Harvey
Oswald killed John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov.  22, 1963,
exactly 25 years ago this week.  In an anniversary spate of
books and TV specials, the trendy theory is that the Mafia
arranged the President's murder and the silencing of Oswald
by Dallas strip-joint owner Jack Ruby.  This, of course,
clashes with the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald
acted alone for his own twisted reasons and that Ruby
impetuously killed the assassin to spare Jacqueline Kennedy
the ordeal of a Dallas trial of her husband's slayer.

As the excerpts from James Reston Jr.'s forthcoming book
show, there are new twists on the lone- assassin conclusion
as well.  His contention that Oswald may have intended to
kill Texas Governor John Connally rather than Kennedy was
rather perfunctorily dismissed by the Warren Commission.
Although Marina Oswald had testified to this belief, the
commission's lawyers found her generally inconsistent and
discounted much of what she said.  The commission relied on
Texas prosecutor Henry Wade for evaluation of the alleged
conversation between Oswald and Ruby, overheard at Ruby's
Carousel Club by Dallas lawyer Carroll Jarnagin.  Wade found
Jarnagin sincere in thinking he had heard Oswald offer to
kill Connally so that gangsters could open up the state for
their rackets, but he told the commission that the lawyer
nonetheless had failed a lie-detector test on the subject.

Other theories persist: that Oswald, an avowed Marxist who
had gone from service as a U.S.  Marin e to spend more than
two years in the Soviet Union, returned as a homicidal tool
of the KGB; that when he tried to go back to the Soviet Union
via Cuba in September 1963, Fidel Castro's embassy in Mexico
City encouraged him to kill Kennedy.  The reason: Castro knew
that the CIA had plotted with Chicago mobster Sam Giancana
and Hollywood boss John Roselli to kill him.

Support, of a sort, for the Castro-as-mastermind theory
recently came from David W. Belin, a top counsel for the
Warren Commission. In his new book, Final Disclosure, Belin
says that ''it is possible'' Oswald was part of a Cuban
conspiracy.  It may have developed, Belin writes, when Oswald
visited Mexico City.

But wait.  For the Mafia-did-it advocates, the plot is much
thicker.  In their view, the man who rode a bus to Mexico
City before the assassination, talking to travelers about his
plans to meet Fidel Castro and then raising a ruckus at the
Cuban embassy, probably was not Oswald.  More likely, he was
an impostor, dispatched by Mafia schemers so that when the
real Oswald killed the President, a Cuban-Soviet connection
would be readily assumed.  The existence of someone posing as
Oswald would, of course, be proof in itself of a conspiracy.

The possibility of an Oswald double is emphasized by the
recent pin-it-on-the-Mob authors: John H. Davis (Mafia
Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F.
Kennedy) and David E. Scheim (Contract on America: The Mafia
Murder of President John F. Kennedy).  Earlier, G. Robert
Blakey and Richard N. Billings suggested that underworld and
anti-Castro schemers had joined to use Oswald as a handy fall
guy (The Plot to Kill the President).

As evidence that someone was making sure that the real Oswald
would be pinned to the crime of the century, Davis cites
long-familiar sightings of ''Oswald'' in the Dallas area
before the assassination: practice shooting at a rifle range,
acting rude while buying ammunition, test- driving a car and
claiming he would soon have ''a lot of money'' to buy it
(Marina insists that he did not drive).

Scheim and Davis readily accept this Oswald as an impostor.
But both conveniently tend to consider other alleged
sightings of Oswald as genuine: sitting in a New Orleans bar
with an associate of mobster Marcello's and taking money
under the table; traveling with another Marcello crony three
months before the assassination.  In this selective
reasoning, neither author seems to consider that some or all
of the witnesses could be mistaken, their memories swayed by
the TV images of the assassin's face.

Yet, as most of the books explain, the Mob had ample reason
to want Kennedy out of the way.  As early as 1957, he sat on
the Senate Rackets Committee chaired by Arkansas' John
McClellan; Robert Kennedy was its chief counsel.  The
Kennedys joined in the committee's stiff grilling of such
gangsters as Los Angeles' Mickey Cohen, Louisiana's Marcello
and Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, whose underworld ties
presumably led to his murder in 1975.

After Robert Kennedy became Attorney General in 1961, the
Justice Department waged a war against organized crime.
Despite the foot dragging of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,
who had long claimed there was no Mafia, the Justice
Department indicted 116 members of the Mob.  Bobby also
undertook a personal vendetta against Hoffa, who was
convicted of jury tampering and pension-fund fraud in
separate trials in 1964.

Robert Kennedy's crusade against the lesser-known Marcello,
whose Mob territory embraced Texas, was almost as intense.
Born in Tunisia of Sicilian parents who moved to the U.S. in
1910, Marcello later used a phony Guatemalan birth
registration to avoid deportation to Italy.  Fully aware that
Marcello was not a Guatemalan, Kennedy in 1961 nevertheless
had Immigration agents hustle him aboard a 78-seat jet as its
lone passenger and deposit him in Guatemala City. Marcello
and his American lawyer were later flown to El Salvador,
where soldiers dumped the two expensively dressed men in the
mountains.  Marcello claimed he fainted three times and broke
several ribs before finding his way to a small airport.
Slipping secretly back into New Orleans, he vowed revenge
against the Kennedys.

But if the Mafia had a strong motive to kill the President,
where are the connections to Oswald, the executioner, and
Ruby, the silencer?  They are almost too numerous to count,
if you accept the claims of Scheim, a manager of computerized
information at the National Institutes of Health.  He seems
to have amassed every reference ever printed about the J.F.K.
assassination figures and mobsters, then woven these threads
to fit a Mafia-hit theory.

Some of the connections are provocative.  Take Oswald.  His
father Robert died of a heart attack in August 1939.  Lee,
born two months later, spent much of his first three years
with Lillian and Charles Murret, his aunt and uncle, in New
Orleans.  In April 1963, while looking for a job in New
Orleans, he stayed with the Murrets. Charles Murret was a
bookmaker in a gambling operation run by Marcello, and for a
few months Oswald allegedly collected bets for his uncle.
Marcello and other New Orleans gangsters thus may have been
aware that the much publicized former Marine defector was in
their midst.

That summer, when Oswald passed out leaflets for his one-man
chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, his literature
listed 544 Camp Street as the chapter office.  That building
housed the offices of Guy Banister, a private investigator
and former FBI agent.  Banister had been hired by Marcello to
help him fight court battles.  Working for Banister was David
Ferrie, a former airline pilot who had publicly berated
Kennedy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
In 1955 Ferrie headed a New Orleans squadron of the Civil Air
Patrol.  One of his cadets was Oswald.  Some witnesses
thought they saw the two together in Clinton, La., in
September 1963.

On the two weekends before the Kennedy assassination, Ferrie
huddled with Marcello at a farmhouse on the mobster's delta
property.  Ferrie later told the FBI that he was helping
Marcello map strategy for a perjury and conspiracy trial then
under way. (Marcello was acquitted on the day of the
assassination.) On the night of the assassination Ferrie
drove 350 miles through a rainstorm to Houston, arriving at
about 4 a.m.  He later insisted that this was a hunting trip,
but he spent hours making calls from public phones at a
skating rink.

To the conspiracy writers, all this meant that Marcello had
been using Ferrie to help plot the killing of Kennedy.
Ferrie's hasty trip, they imply, was to make sure, from
telephones beyond Marcello's haunts, that Ruby killed Oswald.

As for Ruby, his gangster role is magnified by the recent
books that go beyond the Warren Commission's portrayal of a
strip-show proprietor and police buff.  Some authors see him
as a small- time hood in Chicago who worked his way up in
what had been Al Capone's outfit.  He was sent to Dallas in
1947, they say, with other Chicago gangsters to take over
that city's rackets.  Other reports had Ruby being exiled to
Dallas by the Chicago Mob.  Yet Marcello retained control of
Dallas operations, working mainly through local boss Joseph
Civello.  The new books claim that Ruby was close to him and
other Dallas gangsters  active in prostitution, narcotics and
slot machines.

Telephone records show that as the assassination date
approached, Ruby made numerous calls to relatively high Mob
figures in Chicago, New Orleans and Los Angeles, as well as
to two associates of Jimmy Hoffa's.  He later told the FBI
that the calls were made to get union help in stopping other
Dallas clubs from using amateur strippers. Yet the gangsters
he called would not seem likely to trouble themselves with
such petty problems.

However, if Oswald were merely a ''patsy,'' as he claimed, it
is difficult to understand why, after leaving the Texas
School Book Depository building and picking up a revolver at
his rooming house, he gunned down officer J.D.  Tippit, who
was about to question him. Six witnesses identified Oswald as
Tippit's killer.  Three watched him discard empty cartridges.
The cartridges matched the gun he was carrying when police
seized him in a theater.

Nor, despite the decades of sarcasm by earlier critics, has
the basic evidence that Oswald k illed Kennedy been shaken.
Fragments of the bullets that hit Kennedy were matched with
the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Depository.
Oswald's fingerprints were on the rifle barrel.  Fibers from
the clothes he wore when arrested were caught on the rifle
butt.  That morning he had brought a long, thin package to
work from the house in Irving where he spent weekends with
Marina.  He explained to the co-worker who gave him a ride
that it contained curtain rods for his Dallas apartment, even
though his flat had a full set.

One other problem for a conspiracy: Oswald got his job at the
Depository on Oct.  15; the Secret Service did not decide on
the motorcade route past this building until Nov.  14.  It
was not in Dallas newspapers until Nov.  19.

Most of the conspiracy writers contend that there was another
gunman in Dealey Plaza, firing from a grassy knoll in front
of the presidential motorcade.  Numerous witnesses, including
some officers, thought they heard shots from that direction.
Still, as the House Assassinations Committee neared the
completion of an exhaustive two-year reinvestigation of the
Kennedy murder in December 1978, it approved a tentative
conclusion that there had been no conspiracy.

But then Blakey, its chief counsel, found an acoustics expert
who examined a police Dictabelt recording made of one of the
two radio channels used during the motorcade.  After tests in
Dealey Plaza, the scientist concluded that sounds on the belt
came from an escorting motorcycle with its microphone stuck
open, that four shots could be detected on the belt and that
there was a fifty- fifty probability that one of them came
from the knoll.  Blakey called in two other experts, who
raised the estimate to 95%.  The committee then concluded
that a conspiracy was ''probable.''

In 1982, however, the National Academy of Sciences examined
the same recording.  Its experts detected cross talk from the
other police channel on the belt, chatter that it identified
as occurring one minute after the shooting. ''The acoustic
analyses,'' the Academy experts reported, ''do not
demonstrate that there was a grassy-knoll shot.'' Moreover,
three panels of independent experts examined the materials
from Kennedy's autopsy.  All concluded that he had been hit
only by shots fired from behind him.

One conspiracy writer, David Lifton, offered a way out of
these inconvenient findings: in his 1981 book, Best Evidence,
he contended that conspirators had altered the President's
body to conceal evidence of an entry wound from the front.
Others note that Kennedy's brain has not been examined by
anyone, except superficially by the autopsy doctors.  Robert
Kennedy did not turn it over to the National Archives with
other autopsy evidence in 1966. He presumably did not want it
preserved as a grisly artifact.

The timing of Ruby's assault on Oswald also fails to fit any
tidy conspiracy.  If he had been stalking Oswald, why was he
in a Western Union office wiring $25 to one of his strippers,
Karen Carlin, at 11:17 a.m. that Sunday?  Not even the Dallas
police knew when their interrogation of Oswald would end and
when he would be transferred to custody of the county
sheriff.  In fact, a U.S. postal inspector had unexpectedly
dropped in on the questioning and joined the quizzing.  That
held up the transfer by at least half an hour; without the
delay, Ruby would have been too late.  His televised shooting
of Oswald occurred at 11:21 a.m.

The resourceful Warren Commission critics have a solution to
that dilemma too.  They note credible reports that Ruby
visited police headquarters, where Oswald was being held,
twice on the night of the assassination, even attending a
press conference at which Oswald was exposed to
photographers.  Ruby sat at the back of the room, allegedly
carrying his handgun.  He was spotted in a crowd outside the
building about 3 p.m. on Saturday, when the transfer
originally had been scheduled.  On Sunday morning, three TV
technicians reported seeing him near their van overlooking
the transfer ramp well before 11 a.m.

This pattern, these writers say, fits a stalking of Oswald.
But why did Ruby go off to Western Union at a crucial moment?
It was a prearranged plan to make the killing look
spontaneous, they reply. Someone signaled Ruby when Oswald's
move began.  They imply that a cop did this; they do not say
how.

Warren Commission critics point out that its members had
never been told about the CIA's scheming with mobsters to
assassinate Castro, even though Castro had warned publicly on
Sept.  7, 1963, that ''U.S. leaders should think that if they
are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they
themselves will not be safe.'' Allen Dulles, a member of the
commission who had been the CIA director when the plots were
hatched, did not disclose this secret to the investigators.
The CIA had told Robert Kennedy, but he too kept this
information from the commission.  Bobby's apparent
acquiescence in the attempts to kill Castro may have added
twinges of guilt to his deep grief over his brother's death.

Clearly, those plots were something the commission had every
right to know about.  If alerted to the CIA-Mafia
entanglement, it might have worked even harder to close some
of the investigatory gaps through which, 25 years later, the
conspiracy advocates still rush with a welter of accusations,
speculation and, so far, a dearth of conclusive evidence.

Title:       November 22, 1963; inspired by the vision of a
             daring young President, Americans imagine a bold
             new world, only to see the dream brutally
             broken. (portrait of America on the day John F.
             Kennedy was assassinated)
Citation:    People Weekly, Nov 28, 1988 v30 n22 p54(13)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Presidents_Assassination

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A6840052

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1988

As dawn breaks from sea to shining sea, it marks the
beginning of a bright day in Dallas but an unpromising one in
much of the country.  There is a forecast of rain in the
central plains, the heartland  is muffled in clouds, and snow
is falling in the Rockies. But America's spirits are light.
The country is peaceful and prosperous and, more than that,
it seems imbued with a kind of optimism, a freshness, a
yearning for action.

As a people, we have not yet made up our mind about John
Fitzgerald Kennedy, our President of a thousand days, but his
prospects for reelection seem on the upswing.  We were
comfortable with Ike; now we sense an assurance in this
forceful young President who stumbled so badly at the Bay of
Pigs, then brought us through the sobering danger of the
Cuban missile crisis.  With his direct and vigorous speeches,
he makes us feel that we are living in stirring times and
that he is truly a leader, taking us on a path we might not
have chosen for ourselves. ''Let the word go forth from this
time and place,'' he has told us, ''that the torch has been
passed to a new generation of Americans.'' And we  believe
him.

Today this man will be taken from us.  We will learn, in the
years to come, more than we ever wanted to know of his
imperfection.  Yet there is no denying what he has meant to
us, and no reclaiming what we will lose.

What follows is a portrait of America on this day, in the
hours before it takes on its historic meaning.  It is a
mosaic of American lives being lived unaware of impending
tragedy -- an album, if you will, filled with snapshots of a
time beyond saving.  The Schoolboy It is 5 A.M. and still
dark in East Berlin, Conn., as 16-year-old Dick Benson's
mother shakes him awake.  Groggily, the boy tumbles out of
bed, pulls on dungarees, a flannel shirt and battered work
boots, then heads off through the morning chill on his
Columbia bike.  Bare bulbs gleam in the whitewashed barn at
Shepard's farm, just a mile down the road; Ed Rhenberg, the
herdsman, is already milking the 50-odd head of cattle.  Dick
joins in as soon as he arrives.

After three years of working part-time on the farm, Dick, who
makes 60 cents an hour, has the operation down cold.  He
enjoys his time with the animals, as well as the chance to
smoke his cigarettes, far from his mother's disapproving
gaze.  But today he has something -- someone -- on his mind;
the beautiful Joyce Johnson, and she's his date for tonight's
junior prom.  Dick is in love, and aglow with anticipation.

It is only 6:45 A.M. when he finishes cleaning out the stalls
and leaving some fresh Canadian hay for the cows.  But Dick
is already wondering how he's going to get everything done
that he has to do. He has to find the time to wash and polish
the family car -- a white '61 Ford Falcon station wagon.  He
has to pop down to the florist's to get a wrist corsage for
Joyce, then over to the jewelers to pick up a pair of cuff
links for himself.  Back home now, dressed for school in
slacks, tab-collar shirt and sweater, he dashes into the
kitchen and wolfs down his breakfast.

He listens impatiently, shifting from foot to foot, as his
mother warns him to drive carefully.  Then he is behind the
wheel of the Falcon -- actually driving it to school! -- and
the inessential world falls away.  His mind is back on Joyce
Johnson and the promise of enchantment held by the prom,
whose theme will be An Evening in the Blue Grotto.  The
President's personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, calls on John
F. Kennedy in his suite in Fort Worth's Hotel Texas. She is
meeting friends who have driven over from Dallas for
breakfast and asks if the President would mind saying hello.
In a cheerful mood, Kennedy agrees to do it -- later that
morning.  The Bride Waking up for what she knows will be the
last time in her cherished four-poster bed, LoRaine Leland,
20, pulls the covers tightly around herself and slowly
surveys the bedroom that has been her haven for as long as
she can remember.  She glances wistfully at bookshelves
loaded with her childhood collection of stuffed animals and
yearbooks from Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville,
Fla. Then her eyes roam toward her closet, where her white,
floor-length peau de soie wedding gown hangs on the door,
along with a fingertip veil with seed pearls and crystals.

This evening, LoRaine will marry John Charles Davidson, 23, a
rookie fireman, at the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville.
Suddenly remembering all the things still left to be done,
she bolts out of bed and prepares to deal with the
half-packed suitcase she will carry on her honeymoon to South
Florida.  For months LoRaine has been planning what to take,
including her blue plaid madras shorts, a pale-blue chiffon
dress for fancy dinners, a white peignoir to wear to her
bridal bed, and a bottle of Wind Song perfume. Everything
seems under control, but LoRaine can't help worrying about
the weather.  If it rains, her bouffant hairdo -- just like
Jackie Kennedy's -- will be an absolute mess.  How come
nothing like that ever happens to the First Lady?  The
Novelist In Chicago, novelist Saul Bellow is at home,
writing, in the study of the apartment on East 55th Street
that he shares with his wife, Susan, who is five months
pregnant.  He is feeding his Smith- Corona electric
typewriter the cheap, white paper that he buys by the ream
and enjoying the machine's busy chattering as he fingers the
keys. Bellow, 48, is into the final stages of his sixth
novel, Herzog, the tale of a twice-divorced intellectual --
like the author himself -- who can find nothing in Spinoza or
Aristotle to help him understand what has gone wrong in his
life.  The Presidents Flying back to New York's Idlewild
Airport from a business meeting in Dallas, former
presidential candidate Richard Nixon, 50, is back in private
life to stay, he says.  Just last fall he was defeated by
Edmund G. (Pat) Brown in his race for Governor of California
and told the press bitterly afterward that they wouldn't have
Nixon to kick around anymore.  Former President Dwight
Eisenhower, 73, in New York for a banquet this evening, has
already checked into the Waldorf- Astoria Hotel.  At the
Waldorf Towers next door, another veteran of the Oval Office,
89-year-old Herbert Hoover is resting in his apartment. Harry
Truman, 79, is at home with wife Bess in Independence, Mo.
In Washington, D.C., Congressman Gerald Ford, 50, is getting
ready for a meeting with an educational counselor for one of
his children. Jimmy Carter, 39, a Georgia State Senator, is
weighing grain on his farm out in Plains.  Actor Ronald
Reagan, 52, is driving to his Lake Malibu ranch for the day.
Texas oilman George Bush, 39, is preparing to speak at a
luncheon in East Texas, still hoping he can win an uphill
campaign for the U.S.  Senate next fall.  The Hunter Roger
Little can't stop grinning as he regales the regular morning
coffee crowd at the Williamston (Mich.) Cafe with the story
of his hunting trip.  Pulling out a copy of the daily Lansing
State Journal, he tells his buddies to take a gander at the
sports section.  A story inside tells how Little, 26, a
journeyman printer, bagged a 235-lb. nine-point buck, one of
the the biggest deer shot all year in Michigan.  Later, at
work, he thinks about having a trophy made of the buck, now
hanging from a tree at his parents' house, and relives the
moment of the kill one more time.  He had been planning to
shoot the first deer he saw that day, but when he caught a
doe in the sights of his Swedish Mauser rifle, he hesitated,
missing his chance.  He could hardly believe his good luck
when a huge buck sauntered into view seconds later.  Thinking
about it now, Little can still feel his pulse quicken as he
gently squeezes the trigger and holds the Mauser steady
against the recoil.  Lee Harvey Oswald has arrived at the
Irving  home of co-worker Wesley Frazier, an order clerk at
the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.  The two men
sometimes ride to work together in Frazier's car, and today
Frazier notices a long package that Oswald has placed on the
back seat.  Lee says it's curtain rods.  The two men talk
about the presidential visit; glancing up at the still cloudy
skies, Frazier mentions that it sure doesn't look like a good
day for a parade.  The Grapepicker A chill fog shrouds the
Caric and Sons Ranch in Delano, Calif., as Peter Velasco, 53,
begins picking bunches of Almeria, Revere and Emperor grapes.
Dressed in a heavy workshirt, with a bandana around his neck,
Velasco longs in vain for a feeling of warmth.  Like the 60
other workers on this job, most of whom are Filipino
immigrants like himself, Velasco has a chronic case of the
shivers.  At night he sleeps in an unheated company barrack,
and each morning the sun all too slowly breaks through the
fog.

Eight years ago, Velasco quit a small farm he worked with his
brother and headed north.  He receives only 95 cents an hour
for his labor, and three years ago, in 1960, he joined the
organizing committee of the AFL-CIO's fledgling Agricultural
Workers Union. Velasco hopes that John Kennedy, even though
he is a rich man, will help improve conditions for poor
migrant workers like himself.  But in the meantime, Velasco
enjoys the routine of his work.  Listening to Mexican music
on a small transistor radio, he picks only the bunches that
have ripened, the ones with coffee-colored stems.  In an hour
Velasco hopes to have picked 44 pounds of grapes, enough to
fill two large wooden crates.  He moves methodically and
quickly, knowing that the exertion of moving the crates will
ease the cold in his fingers and toes.  Frazier and Oswald
are arriving at the Book Depository.  At about the same time,
Kennedy and Lawrence O'Brien, his close friend and aide, are
looking out a hotel window toward a vast parking lot.
Kennedy remarks that if anyone wanted to get him, it would be
very easy to do it here.  The Child ''Girls, today we will
have a special treat,'' Sister Alice announces to her
third-grade class at the Academy of the Holy Names in Tampa,
Fla. ''While we write our thank-you letters to the President,
we are going to watch his motorcade in Dallas on
television.'' Of the 25 girls present, 8-year-old Rosemary
Weekley knows that she has the most to be thankful for.  Four
days before, Sister Alice had taken the class to nearby
MacDill Air Force Base to catch a quick glimpse of President
Kennedy as he arrived on Air Force One for a briefing and a
speaking tour in Florida.  Rosemary waved excitedly as she
watched the President emerge from the plane and climb into a
waiting car.  Then, as Secret Service agents scrambled after
him, Kennedy impulsively leaped from the car to greet Sister
Alice's class. Rosemary was the first one to shake his hand;
she still can't believe it happened.  Now she must find the
right words to thank her hero for bringing such joy into her
life, and she hopes that seeing him again on television will
give her inspiration.  As Kennedy climbs onto a flatbed truck
to speak to a crowd of about 5,000 gathered outside his
hotel, the rain stops and the sun peeks through.  There are
shouts of ''Where's Jackie?'' The President smiles and points
to his hotel suite, where the First Lady is reportedly still
getting ready.  The Corpsman When President Kennedy
challenged America's youth to make the world a better place,
he struck a spark that brought Doug Frago to the tiny village
of Rabinal in Guatemala. Normally on a day like today the
23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer would be teaching the
farmers how to protect their crops from disease or showing
them how to clean up their beehives as a way of increasing
honey production.  Growing up on a sweet-potato and
watermelon farm in central California, Frago got hooked on
bees when he was 10.  And he always wanted to travel.
Graduating from college with an agronomy degree, he was
looking for a way to combine his work with his wanderlust.
In President Kennedy's Peace Corps he found one.

Today he is eight kilometers from Rabinal, in the village of
Cabulco, vaccinating dogs against rabies.  Although the
village is in the mountains, the temperature is close to 90
degreesF.  After a while, Doug and his two Guatemalan
assistants take a break from the dogs -- they will vaccinate
300 today -- to advise a group of farmers.  Later they will
sit down to a lunch of tortillas, black beans and coffee.
The President finishes his speech and walks back toward the
hotel for a Chamber of Commerce breakfast.  Along the way he
stops to shake the hand of 16-year-old Mary Ann Glicksman.
Isn't she supposed to be in school? he asks.  When she says
yes, he smiles and says, ''Tell your teacher the President of
the United States says to excuse you.'' The Waiter The
thought of having to handle dishes while wearing white gloves
puts waiter Ossie Richie in a panic. ''What if I drop
something on the President?'' he wonders. Mindful that it
isn't often a sharecropper's son is chosen to serve breakfast
to a President, Richie, 23, is determined to do the job
right.  But he knows that so much could go wrong.

Last night, for example, while working his regular job at
Fort Worth's exclusive Town Club, Richie was so preoccupied
with the President's visit that he absentmindedly locked a
group of poker-playing bigwigs in a back room for 15 minutes.
There will be hell to pay for that later.  But now, after
grooming and rehearsing all night, Richie is a picture of
perfection.  His black Sunday shoes have been spit-shined so
you can see your face in them.  His brand-new white shirt is
gleaming.  His tan waiter's waistcoat with its brass buttons
is spotless.

Standing before the American flag, on a platform overlooking
the hotel's packed banquet room, Richie clenches his fists to
make sure his gloves are tight.  He hears applause as
President Kennedy enters with his wife.  Then, to Richie's
amazement, the President reaches out to shake his hand.
Light-headed with excitement, Richie pours the President a
cup of coffee and serves him his eggs.  As he bends over,
though, Richie suddenly senses his suspenders are slipping.
He considers reaching inside his jacket to make the needed
adjustments, but a quick glance at the Secret Service men
standing silently nearby tells him that wouldn't be a good
idea. ''They might think I'm reaching for a gun or
something,'' he says to himself. ''Bad things could happen to
me real f ast.'' The Mother Mary Ann Fischer, mother of the
celebrated Fischer quints, feels like a star.  She and her
husband, Andrew, are being driven through New York's hectic
streets to tape the TV show I've Got a Secret -- in the same
limo that President Kennedy had used two weeks earlier. ''My
wife will never believe this,'' the excited driver is saying.
''First, I have the President in my car, then the parents of
quints.  Unbelievable!'' Mary Ann, 30, smiles at the
celebrity treatment, but her thoughts wander back to the
babies, already ten weeks old but still in the hospital back
in Aberdeen, S.Dak.  Although born two months prematurely,
all are doing well -- thank God for that.  She hopes one will
be home by Thanksgiving and that all ten of her kids will be
together by Christmas.  That would be something to celebrate.
Cheers go up at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast as Jackie
arrives with her Secret Service escort.  She is wearing a
pink wool suit with navy-blue lapels, and a pink pillbox hat.

In the audience is Dr.  Marion Brooks, a Fort Worth physician
who is a leader in the black community.  Dr.  Brooks is a
late addition to the gathering.  Originally, the group had
not included blacks but eventually invited 50.  The Minister
By mid-morning, the Rev.  Colin Gracey is at his desk in the
Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord, Mass., working his way
through the stack of mail that piled up during the week he
was in jail.  Gracey was arrested in Williamston, N.C., for
taking part in a march against segregation, sponsored by the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  Two days ago, the
28-year-old clergyman drove all night long in his dilapidated
1953 blue Ford station wagon, arriving back in Concord at 7
A.M.  He is happy to be home with his wife, Susan, and their
three little girls. But he is also tired and preoccupied.
His mind keeps drifting back to the previous evening, when he
was summoned to a church meeting and questioned for nearly an
hour about his reasons for participating in the freedom
march.  A number of church members had been upset by a
photograph in the local paper that showed the new curate
walking arm-in-arm with a black family.  Staring out the
window at the gray slate roof of his church, Gracey reflects
on the fact that civil disobedience is hard for some people
to understand. But he believes the President is committed to
the cause of racial equality, and the young minister will not
forsake his own commitment to activism.  Instead he hopes to
do a better job of explaining to his critics in this town,
whose very name is synonymous with freedom, why he feels
compelled to speak out against racial injustice.  The
Kennedys are back in their suite preparing to leave for the
flight to Dallas.  The President telephones onetime
Vice-President John Nance Garner in Uvalde, Texas, to
congratulate him on his 95th birthday.  The Newsman An eager
young television correspondent, Dan Rather, 32, is CBS News
bureau chief in New Orleans.  He has been assigned to set up
the network's coverage of the President's visit to Texas, and
after working through the night, he had been given an urgent,
unrelated request.  The CBS Evening News, with its anchorman,
Walter Cronkite, has recently been expanded from 15 minutes
to a half hour, and the editors were concerned about not
having enough material to fill out the broadcast.  At the
last minute they called Rather and asked him to cover John
Garner's birthday.  After flying at first light from Dallas
to Garner's ranch in a small charter plane, Rather and his
cameramen filmed an interview as Garner came out on his porch
to greet Miss West Texas Wool and have his picture taken with
her.  As Rather looked on, the elder statesman, holding a
glass of bourbon in one hand, reached over to pat Miss West
Texas Wool on the backside with the other.  Now, back in
Dallas, Rather smiles as he remembers the scene.  The Family
At home in McLean, Va.,  with his wife, Ethel, Attorney
General Bobby Kennedy, 38, has planned a working lunch with a
Justice Department official.  Ted Kennedy, 29, the junior
Senator from Massachusetts, is presiding over the Senate,
while his wife, Joan, 27, visits a beauty parlor in
anticipation of their fifth-anniversary dinner that night.
At the White House, preparations are under way for John-John
Kennedy's third-birthday party on Monday, just three days
from now, and Caroline's sixth on Nov.  27.  The Kennedy
party departs for Dallas on Air Force One. Vice-President
Lyndon Johnson and Texas Governor John Connally are aboard
Air Force Two, already airborne.  According to LBJ's
executive assistant, Liz Carpenter, the talk on the Johnson
plane is about the reception awaiting Kennedy in Dallas.
Someone calls it ''the most anti-everything city in Texas.''
The Soldier In Vietnam's central highlands Sgt.  Jerry Sims,
33, rips open a box of C-Rations and practically inhales a
can full of ham and lima beans.  Mildly aware of his own body
odor, ever present in the steamy jungle, Sims straightens his
camouflage jungle fatigues and places his prized green beret
on his head.  Then he slings his M-16 rifle over his shoulder
and turns a watchful eye toward 100 fiercely independent
mountain tribesmen -- Montagnards he has been assigned to
train as an anti-Communist guerrilla force.

Despite the hardships of his duty, Sims, a high school
dropout, considers himself a lucky man.  Before he enlisted
in the Army in 1946, he had been hanging out with a bad crowd
in Youngstown, Ohio. Two of his old buddies were later
convicted of murder; one was sent to the electric chair.  But
now, after 17 years of distinguished service in West Germany
and Korea, Sims is an intelligence expert in the Army Special
Forces.  Like most of the 12,000 Army men currently in
Vietnam on President Kennedy's orders, Sims is proud to help
stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia.  And as a
Green Beret, he is a member of an elite corps of guerrilla
fighters that Kennedy hopes will prove more effective than
conventional forces.

Sims and his Montagnards settle down for a watchful night,
with ambush patrols on the alert for Vietcong.  The Singer
Mary Travers, 27, the husky-voiced blond centerpiece of
Peter, Paul and Mary, the country's favorite folk trio, is
sleeping in.  Last night's concert in Fort Worth was another
sweet success, and tonight's performance is about an hour's
drive away in Dallas.  Later, after breakfast, she and Paul
get into their rental car.  Peter and a friend are planning
to follow in another car.  President Kennedy will be in
Dallas today, too, and Mary remembers the gala concert the
group played for him almost two years ago.  Afterward, during
a party at Vice-President Lyndon Johnson's home, Jack Kennedy
linked arms with Gene Kelly for a lively song-and-tap-dance
version of ''When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.'' Mary replays the
fond memory in her mind as Paul guides the car onto the
highway a little after 11:30 A.M.  It is a sunny Texas day.
The road is flat, and the riding is easy under a vast canopy
of clearing blue sky.  They are listening to the radio.
Touching down at Love Field the President is pleasantly
surprised by the size and exuberance of the waiting crowd.
He remarks that the throng doesn't look anti-Kennedy.  The
Candidate Ramona Lucero is a nervous wreck.  She and four
classmates are in the stage dressing room at Bernalillo
(N.Mex.) High School, where Miss Rael, the Spanish teacher,
is showing them how to apply mascara.  In a few hours,
Ramona, 16, and the other girls will be performing in a
talent show in front of 500 students, parents and teachers.
The winner will be crowned homecoming queen on Saturday night
at the big basketball game and dance.  For Bernalillo (pop.
2,600), a small town on the Rio Grande with no movie theater
or bowling alley, basketball is everything, and being elected
homecoming queen would be the next thing to heaven.

Miss Rael is pouring on the hair spray, and the girls are
coughing and laughing like crazy, but it doesn't make them
any less nervous. Ramona is trying to feel confident, but she
can't help worrying how her version of ''Moon River'' will
sound compared with the acts of the other girls.  She decides
to concentrate instead on the clothes she'll be wearing --
the $9 gold four-inch heels (her first pair) and the $18
yellow wool suit her mother bought at J.C.  Penney's and
hemmed a little below the knee, just like Jackie Kennedy's.
After the contest, Ramona knows, the school band will lead a
parade through the dirt streets of town.  It will be really
cool to be riding just ahead of the floats, in one of the
convertibles the Albuquerque Chevy dealership has loaned the
school for the big day. There will be a pep rally tonight and
a bonfire, and tomorrow the big game and the dance.  After
landing at Love Field the Kennedys climb into the open
limousine for the motorcade through Dallas. Because he wants
the crowd to see him, the President has decided to dispense
with the limo's optional top.  The Beach Boys They are hot on
the charts and in concert, but this morning Brian Wilson, 21,
Mike Love, 22, and Al Jardine, 21, of the Beach Boys are
still zonked out in Wilson's rented Hawthorne, Calif., house.
There is virtually no furniture in the place, and Love is
asleep on the floor.  He and Wilson were up most of the
night, working on a song titled ''Warmth of the Sun.'' Brian
kept playing around with the melody, which was haunting and
mystical, and all Mike could think of was ''the loss of
someone you love.'' The Stars, Present and Future Gary Hart,
26, a third-year student at Yale Law School, is in his New
Haven, Conn., apartment preparing for an afternoon job
interview with a Denver law firm.  Bill Bradley, 20, the
Princeton basketball star, is studying in his university
library carrel.  Folksinger Joan Baez, 22, is shopping for
groceries in Carmel, Calif., American bandstand host Dick
Clark, 33, has arrived in Dallas with a bus load of musicians
for a one-night-only performance of his Caravan of Stars.  In
London, earlier in the day, a shaggy-haired group called the
Beatles, who had recently returned from their first European
tour, released their second album, With the Beatles.  Their
first U.S. single, ''I Want to Hold Your Hand,'' is scheduled
for release in January.  Kennedy halts the motorcade briefly
to greet a group of children waiting at curbside.  They stand
behind a sign saying, ''Mr. President, please stop and shake
our hands.'' He does.  Riding with her husband two cars
behind the President, Lady Bird Johnson observes with
pleasure that there is no indication of hostility.  The
Player Taking a breather during practice at the Redskins'
stadium in Washington, D.C., wide receiver Bobby Mitchell,
28, wonders when his team will summon the will to win.  The
Redskins have lost seven straight National Football League
games and look ragged now as they practice for Sunday's game
against the Philadelphia Eagles.  Still, Mitchell, the first
black man to play with the Redskins, is happy to have quieted
redneck fans with the brilliance of his play after joining
the club the year before.  His work off the field is going
well too.  A few months ago, after making several appearances
with Attorney General Robert Kennedy in an effort to persuade
young blacks to stay in school, Mitchell was invited to a
formal gathering in the White House and was astounded when
President Kennedy entered the room and immediately walked
past several dignitaries to shake his hand.  Nothing could
ever compare to the pride he felt at that moment.

Right now, as he goes back on the field to run some pass
routes, Mitchell has more mundane matters on his mind: His
timing with quarterback Norm Snead is off just a hair. ''With
a perfect pass,'' he thinks to himself, ''there is no way
anyone can catch me.'' The Dallas Trade Mart, where the
President is to have lunch and make a speech, is electric
with anticipation.  There are presents for both of the
President's children, including a big teddy bear for the
birthday boy, John-John.  The Astronaut Waiting his turn at
the helm of a flight simulator at a Boeing plant in Seattle,
Ed Dwight, 30, sips his coffee in silence and listens as a
dozen of his fellow astronaut-trainees banter among
themselves.  The first black accepted in the space program,
Dwight feels like a pariah.  Sure, some of the guys sidle up
to him occasionally.  He assumes they figure it might be to
their advantage to stay on good terms with him, since
President Kennedy has taken a personal interest in his
career.  But others, Dwight believes, have decided to give
him the cold shoulder. Despite having logged more than 2,000
hours as an Air Force test pilot, Dwight himself sometimes
jokes that President Kennedy ''picked me out of a turnip
patch'' to become an astronaut.  But he will never forget how
deeply honored he felt in November 1961, when he received a
personal letter from Kennedy asking him to apply for the
space program.  Come what may, he plans to prove himself
worthy of his Commander in Chief's high regard.  The Children
Standing outside St. Ann's School in the Little Mexico
section of Dallas with her class of 7th and 8th graders,
Sister Audrey, 28, looks proudly over her 54 breathlessly
expectant students.  Up at 5 A.M. for morning meditation,
chores and Mass, Sister Audrey had said a special prayer that
President Kennedy would be safe in Dallas and would help
bring hope into the lives of these Hispanic children, the
poorest of Dallas' poor.  Later the Roman Catholic nun could
barely contain herself when Sister Maria, the principal, told
everyone that the presidential motorcade would pass right by
St. Ann's.  Sister Audrey fielded question after question
from her class, particularly about the Secret Service. ''Why
would the President need protection coming past our school?''
one boy asked.  Now, after the children have patiently braved
the cold for an hour, a wild cheer goes up as the motorcade
comes into view.  President Kennedy waves to Sister Audrey's
students and mouths, ''Hi, how are you?'' Later, the sisters
led all the students in a prayer of thanksgiving for having
seen the President.  The limo starts slowly down the slope in
front of the Book Depository.  Often, as the motorcade wound
its way, the slow-moving press and VIP buses in its wake had
backfired.  Some parade-watchers had jumped at the sound,
then laughed at their own skittishness.  People had been
making macabre jokes about the anti-Kennedy feeling in
Dallas.  The Protester Insurance salesman Ed Crissey is
meeting his lawyer and a friend for lunch in a little
restaurant in downtown Dallas.  He expects the place to be
less crowded than usual, since most of the regulars will be
three blocks away watching the Kennedy motorcade.  For his
part, Crissey, 40, is content to watch the procession on the
evening news.  He senses that ''something is going to
happen'' today, that there is going to be some kind of
confrontation, and he wants people to see him in a public
place well away from the motorcade.  If there is trouble, the
former military intelligence officer, a member of the
right-wing John Birch Society, suspects he might be held
partly responsible. For it is he, along with multimillionaire
Nelson Bunker Hunt and oilman H. R. ''Bum'' Bright, who, in
today's Dallas Morning News, took out a full-page ad, with an
obituary-black border, asking why Kennedy is soft on
Communism.  Sitting in the restaurant now, Crissey is telling
himself he doesn't want anything serious to happen today. But
he doesn't regret the ad -- it's gotten to the point that
right-minded citizens have to speak out.  The Actress It is
early afternoon in New York, and actress Elizabeth Ashley,
24,  has just opened her eyes.  Lying next to her, still
asleep in her one-bedroom basement apartment, is George
Peppard.  They have been lovers for more than a year, but he
has been in Europe for weeks.  She looks down at him
contentedly.  She can't believe her good luck: She is
starring in Neil Simon's smash hit Barefoot in the Park, with
Robert Redford in his first leading role, and only two weeks
ago they were invited to a late-night party given by
President Kennedy's sister, Eunice, and her husband, Sargent
Shriver.  The President was one of the guests.  At one point
he thrilled her by asking, ''How does it feel to be the
newest star on Broadway?''

Could she be imagining all this?  Ashley wonders.  No, out on
the coffee table in the living room there is proof positive.
The cover of this week's LIFE  carries her picture.

But the newest star on Broadway has to be at Mr. Kenneth's in
half an hour to have her hair done.  Thank God there's no
matinee today. Careful not to wake Peppard, she slips into a
pale long-john shirt, farmer overalls and Tony Lama boots.
Without makeup, she puts on her Navy pea jacket, a brown
tweed stevedore's cap and, of course, the requisite dark
glasses.  Stopping at the bedroom door, she reflects once
more on how far she has come.  Little Elizabeth Cole from
Baton Rouge, La.  Starring in a Broadway show.  Making love
to a movie star. Hobnobbing with Kennedys.  What more could
anyone ask?  How much happier could anyone be?  It would take
something truly terrible, she thinks, to darken this day,
this golden time in her life.  She blows the sleeping Peppard
a kiss and heads out the door.  The Schoolgirl At Alexander
Ramsey High School in Roseville, Minn., some members of the
senior class are gathered in the band room for a special
slide-show presentation about the Civil War.  Many of the 100
students gossip during the show about what they will do that
evening after the big basketball game between the Ramsey Rams
and the Moundview Mustangs.  Patty Andrews, 17, plans to
borrow her father's Volkswagen bug to go cruising with her
best friend, Marilyn Holmquist.  But as the music quickens
toward the end of the slide show, Patty and Marilyn  listen
raptly to a narrator's solemn description of the scene at
Ford's Theater in Washington on April 14, 1865.  A hush falls
over the students as they look at an image of Abraham Lincoln
in the presidential box, oblivious to the presence behind him
of a lone gunman, John Wilkes Booth.  In Dealey Plaza,
Dallas, a shot rings out.  AN EPILOGUE The junior prom he had
looked forward to, says Dick Benson, was ''sad and very
subdued.'' Six years later he went to Vietnam, where he lost
a leg and the use of one arm when a booby trap exploded under
him.  Now 41, he still lives in East Berlin, Conn. -- with
his wife, Gail, and their daughter.

LoRaine Leland's wedding to fireman John Davidson went ahead
as planned.  They have two children, and this week will
celebrate their silver anniversary.  Inevitably, LoRaine, 45,
is reminded each year of how tragedy intruded on what should
have been the happiest day of her life.

Author Saul Bellow, 73, won the 1965 National Book Award for
Herzog.  Divorced from Susan, he married Alexandra Ionescu
Tulcea in 1974.

Roger Little, 51, marked the opening of hunting season last
week by stalking deer with two of his sons.  He has eight
children from three marriages.  The head of the magnificent
buck he shot in November 1963 is mounted in his photography
studio in Calumet, Mich.

As secretary-treasurer emeritus of the United Farmworkers'
Union, Peter Velasco, 78, still champions the cause of
migrant farmworkers. He lives in La Paz, Calif., with his
wife, Delores Neubauer, a former nun.

Rosemary Weekley, 33, is married, has two children and lives
in LaGrange, Ga., where she works as a pediatric nurse.

Doug Frago, 48, left the Peace Corps in 1965 to become a
farmer. He rejoined the Corps in June 1985,  and has become
its associate director for international operations.

Ossie Richie, 48, is a bartender at the same Fort Worth
hotel, now renamed the Hyatt Regency.

After raising their quintuplets, and their five other
children, Mary Ann Fischer, 55, and her husband, Andy, were
divorced in 1980.

The Rev.  Colin Gracey, now 53 and chaplain to Northeastern
University in Boston, remains a vigorous social activist,
lately in the cause of the environment.

Dan Rather, 57, who came to national prominence through his
coverage of the Kennedy assas sination, now commands a $3
million a year salary as anchorman of the CBS Evening News.

After completing two combat tours in Vietnam, Jerry Sims was
still a staunch supporter of American involvement in the war,
and retired as a master sergeant in 1967.  Now 58 and the
grandfather of five, he owns an electrical contracting
business in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Mary Travers, 52, continues to make music with Peter Yarrow
and Paul Stookey.  Going to Dallas is always difficult, she
says. ''For me it's the place of  remembrance.''

Ramona Lucero, 41, was not elected homecoming queen, and
remembers there wasn't much joy for anyone in that night's
festivities.  The mother of three children, she still lives
in Bernalillo, N. Mex., and teaches in the elementary school.

The Beach Boys endure but rarely play ''Warmth of the Sun''
anymore because it reminds them of JFK's death. ''That song
had so much impact for me,'' says Mike Love, 47, ''I can
hardly listen to it now.''

In 1983, wide receiver Bobby Mitchell, 53, was elected to the
National Football League Hall of Fame.  He is assistant
general manager of the Washington Redskins.

Three days after the assassination Ed Dwight was
unceremoniously dropped from the astronaut tra ining program.
''When my protector was killed, I was out,'' he says.
Dwight, now 55, is a successful Denver-based artist whose
work has included bronze busts of Martin Luther King Jr.,
Hank Aaron and jazzman Charlie Parker.

Still working with disadvantaged students, as a school
administrator at Sacred Heart School in San Francisco, Sister
Audrey, 53, believes the assassination robbed the poor of
hope. ''My students had seen him and taken him into their
hearts,'' she says. ''It could have made a real difference in
their lives.''

While he continues to support conservative causes, Ed
Crissey, 65, now draws his inspiration from the Bible. ''I'm
a fundamentalist,'' he says, ''and proud of it.'' While he
defends his role in placing the anti-Kennedy ad, he says he
regrets the President's death.

When Elizabeth Ashley and her co-star Robert Redford went
onstage to play Barefoot in the Park the night of JFK's
murder, they were determined to get the audience's mind off
the tragedy. ''I remember Redford saying, 'Let's really try
and get them to laugh,' '' says Ashley, 49.  Married in 1966,
she and George Peppard were later divorced.

When the principal of her high school abruptly stopped her
class's Civil War slide show to announce, ''The President has
been shot,'' Patty Andrews didn't know at first whether he
was talking about Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy.  Now 42
and married to her high school sweetheart, she is a school
secretary in Plymouth, Minn., and the mother of two
daughters. ''We were all so innocent, so carefree before
Kennedy was killed,'' she says. ''We grew up real quick.''

Title:       Camelot and Dallas: the entangling Kennedy
             myths.

Authors:     Morley, Jefferson
Citation:    The Nation, Dec 12, 1988 v247 n18 p646(3)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Conspiracy in motion pictures_Criticism,
               interpretation, etc.

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A6852070

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Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1988

November 22 was, as always, a national commemoration of two
American myths: Camelot and conspiracy.  The television
specials, the books, the 0p-Ed commentary all focused on
either the timeless glory of the Kennedy years or on
previouslyundetected machinations, real or imagined, behind
his murder.  On the one hand, the yearning for morally heroic
leadership; on the other, the fear of undemocratic plots.
The anniversary of the assassination endures as a national
rite because it brings together these two elemental themes of
American history.

Camelot and conspiracy are shorthand for two different ways
in which Americans make sense of national public life.  What
gives November 22 its enduring pull on the public imagination
is the constant and unsettling tension between the two.  John
F.  Kennedy's Camelot was a modern version of John Winthrop's
"city upon a hill." In this myth of history, the American
story is proclaimed by great and attractive men.  The
conspiracy theories of Dallas are an installment in the
American populist tradition of anti-Masonry, muckraking and
McCarthyism, official history, seen as a ruse perpetrated by
unaccountable elites.  American history is manipulated by
unseen hands.  Each November 22, we can try out the view from
Winthrop's hill and from the Grassy Knoll.

Americans appear to believe in both myths.  In a recent poll,
30 percent of the respondents said Kennedy was the "greatest"
President of the United States, more than cited any other
President.  Polls taken on the assassination since the late
1960s show that four out of five respondents do not believe
the Warren Commission's explanation of the assassination.  An
ABC-Washington Post poll in 1983 found that 80 percent
believe more than one person was responsible for the gunfire
in Dealey Plaza.

But if the Warren Commission could not, or would not, uncover
the truth, if Camelot could be undone by hidden plotters,
which myth of history makes more sense?  This is the
underlying symbolic question of November 22, and we
commemorate Kennedy's death in order to mull that over.
"What has become unravened since that afternoon iii Dallas,"
writes Don DeLillo, author of the best-selling novel Libra,
an imaginative re-creation of the assassination, "is not the
plot, of course, not the dense mass of character and events,
but the sense of a coherent reality most of us shared." The
anniversary of the Kennedy assassination is the occasion for
trying to regain that "coherent reality."

The assassination took on this purpose almost immediately, In
a string of reassuring pop best-sellers, Kennedy's death was
reconstructed to make sense of public life torn apart by
violence. In books like Night of Camp David, The President's
Plane Is Missing, The Man and Seven Days in May, Camelot and
conspiracy were combined to revive the dead Kennedy, The
apparent threat to the fictional President actually presaged
his vindication before the world.

The basic plot device of these books is simple: The American
presidency faces mortal peril from unknown but sinister
forces-a falling roof, a missing plane, madness or military
plotters.  The threat to the integrity of the President,
however, is matched by the President's own bold measures,
which promise worldwide disarmament, racial harmony or some
other political breakthrough.  The presidency survives the
threat and the nation emerges a better and safer place.
During the national crises in these books (and the films made
of some of them), history is always guided by the skillful
hand of the pragmatic liberal leader.

But in the 1970s came revelations of Kennedy's plans to
assassinate foreign leaders, of his sexual license, his
bugging of Martin Luther King Jr.  The Kennedy assassination
was reworked, especially by Hollywood, to present a different
American reality. Camelot often was portrayed as a hoax,
conspiracy as realism.

Hollywood gave its mass audience a deeply suspicious view of
elites.  The belief in conspiracy, which burst out around
1966, has always been derided by elite commentators.  The
National Commission on Violence, appointed in June 1968,
insisted that doubts about the Warren Commission were caused
not by the probe's obvious flaws but by "primal anxieties
created by the archetypal crime of parricide." Hollywood, in
movies like Executive Action, Winter Kill, Nashville, Taxi
Driver and The Parallax View, responded that the people were
not sick, the system was.

In Alan Pakuna's The Parallax View, Warren Beatty plays a
newspaper reporter who discovers that the agents of the
mysterious Parallax Corporation are behind the assassinations
of two promising Kennedy-like politicians.  After witnessing
the second assassination, Beatty races to tell the truth,
only to be gunned down by men who have framed him as the
killer.  A Warren-like commission concludes that the
investigative reporter was the assassin, a "confused and
distorted" lone madman.  This is paranoia squared: Those who
expose the secret manipulators of history will be blamed for
their crimes.

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is more subtle.  Robert De Niro
is Travis Bickle, a cabdriver with a crush on a pretty woman
who works on the campaign staff of presidential candidate
Charles Palantine. As Travis woos her, we see the imitation
Kennedy candidate in the background intoning, "We ARE the
people." Far from being a great leader, he is a precursor of
Dan Quayle.  The campaign aide spurns Travis and he next
tries to rescue a young prostitute from the city streets.
She answers his old-fashioned morality by mouthing the
cliches of "liberation" and rejects him as well.

Travis buys a gun, and in a hotel room aims it at the traffic
below, as if seeing redemption from the sixth floor of the
Texas School Book Depository.  He has gone mad and, heavily
armed, closes in on a Palantine rally where he is chased by
the Secret Service. Humiliated, he turns his murderous rage
on the men who abuse the young hooker.  And when he wakes up
from this bloody rampage he finds himself celebrated in the
tabloids, famous for fifteen minutes.

Taxi Driver was a disconcerting variation on assassination
mythology because it inverted both the myth of Camelot and of
conspiracy.  Travis is not an assassin of morality but a
moral assassin who pathetically fails to shape history by
shedding blood. He is not the agent, witting or unwitting, of
sinister unseen forces but their degraded victim.  In the
film, society's ideals of glamour, the buck and fast sex are
the real conspiracy against Everyman.  The sense of
helplessness created by political assassination is not an
isolated incident in otherwise normal public life, but the
enduring nature of urban reality.

The popular mistrust of official history in the 1970s was so
deep it was comic.  In 1979 a Congressional investigating
committee concluded that the Kennedy assassination was the
result of a political conspiracy"Next thing you know"' Johnny
Carson, emcee of the Zeitgeist, gibed that night, "they'll be
blaming World War 11 on Hitler."

With the onset of the Reagan era, such cynicism was muted.
Ronald Reagan restored Hollywood style to the White House and
claimed, not always implausibly, to be heir to the Kennedy
legacy. Emulation of the rich and famous became a refuge from
the disintegration of public life seen in Taxi Driver Camelot
and conspiracy in Dallas were domesticated for prime time,
"Who shot J.F.K.?" became "Who shot J.R.?"

By November 1983, the Camelot backlash was in full swing.
The twentieth anniversary of the assassination received even
more media exposure than had the anniversaries of 1978 and
1973 -much of it devoted to nostalgia about the Kennedy
family and the Kennedy "charm." The underside of Camelot was
acknowledged, then dismissed as unimportant.  Adam Walinsky,
a former Robert Kennedy aide turned Reagan supporter,
asserted the prevailing elite mood in The New York Times: "We
are done with the debunking."

As for conspiracy, there also was a certain (perhaps
understandable) impatience with the rich ambiguities of the
assassination.  The Washington Post said the truth would
never be known.  A Los Angeles Times reporter dared to
conclude that the Warren Commission was right.  Newsweek left
the public misgivings about the government's version of
events to an inarticulate barber in Iowa.  The magazine asked
who was responsible for the Kennedy assassination.  "People
in general, I guess, or the higher-ups," the man answered.
"In other words, not just your run-of-the-mill people that
are walking the streets."

This year's twenty-fifth anniversary was, as they say, the
biggest yet.  The presidential campaign, echoing with themes
of Kennedy and conspiracy, was a prelude.  Dukakis and Quayle
both packaged themselves as Kennedys and failed.  Bush
packaged liberalism as a kind of conspiracy and succeeded.
Updating Joe McCarthy and Phyllis Schlafly, he presented the
L-word as an ongoing plot card-carrying" elite against the
common man.  Reagan again linked himself to Kennedy, great
leaders who provided a bulwark against the conspiracy that
dared not speak its name.

In commemorations of the anniversary of the assassination
itself, conspiracy returned with a vengeance.  Several TV
specials and books identify the Mafia as the culprit.  In
DeLillo's Libra, Camelot is rotten with conspiracies.  The
change in mood from 1983 was exemplified by the NBC
miniseries Favorite Son.  Five years ago, the miniseries of
the assassination was JFK, a pious epic of Camelot starring
Martin Sheen.  Favorite Son, by contrast, was a satiric romp
through the intrigues of the Kennedy and Reagan years:
attempted assassination, Latin American
counterrevolutionaries, rogue C.I.A.  plots, kinky sex
performed as frequently as possible and a genial grandpa of a
President who sets everything right at the end.

If only the unsettling celebration of the twenty-fifth
anniversary could be concluded so neatly.  Camelot and
conspiracy are not just tokens of our nostalgia but
fundamental questions of the political order.  Is history
beyond the reach of ordinary Americans?  Can (or should) the
United States recapture the imperial grandeur of the Kennedy
years?  In reliving what DeLillo the six seconds that broke
the back of the American century," we feel a deep unspoken
tension.  That's why the gunfire in Dealey Plaza still scares
us, still rings in our  ears.

Title:       See Oswald's lair - for $4. (Texas School Book
             Depository, Dallas)
Citation:    Time, Feb 27, 1989 v133 n9 p25(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Texas. School Book Depository_Galleries and
               museums
             Dallas, Texas_Galleries and museums

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination;  Oswald, Lee
             Harvey_Galleries and museums

Locations:   Texas

Reference #: A7050372

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1989

Now, for just $4 ($3 for senior citizens), one can ride an
elevator to the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book
Depository in Dallas and see the perch from which Lee Harvey
Oswald gunned down a President.  The book cartons have been
arranged just the way Oswald placed them 25 years ago to
avoid being seen by co-workers.  True, a clear screen keeps
tourists from entering the assassin's lair, but the view of
Dealey Plaza from accessible windows is about the same.  One
cannot, however, bring a rifle to check out the sights.  A
metal detector has been set up to spot gun toters.

The controversial display opened this week, after years of
local arguments over how, if at all, the site should be
preserved. A private nonprofit foundation raised $1.3 million
to create the museum, and Dallas County, which owns the
building, built a reception area with a $2.2 million bond
issue.  The Kennedy family, which was known to oppose the
project, was not consulted on the plans.

Title:       More shots in Dealey Plaza. (Oliver Stone's
             upcoming movie portrays assassination of John F.
             Kennedy)

Authors:     Zoglin, Richard
Citation:    Time, June 10, 1991 v137 n23 p64(2)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Film adaptations_Criticism, interpretation, etc.
             On the Trail of the Assassins (Book)_Usage

People:      Stone, Oliver_Production and direction;
             Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A10824145

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1991

Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?  Were three shots fired in
Dealey Plaza on that awful afternoon in November, or were
there more?  Was there a large-scale, sinister conspiracy
behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or just one
troubled little man with communist sympathies and a
Mannlicher-Carcano rifle?

Unanswered questions about the Kennedy assassination have
nagged the nation for nearly 28 years, rousing emotions,
inciting speculation, provoking arguments. It was probably
inevitable that Hollywood would step into this minefield
sooner or later -- and probably inevitable that the man
leading the charge would be Oliver Stone, filmdom's most
flamboyant interpreter of the 1960s (Platoon, The Doors, Born
on the Fourth of July).

Stone is only halfway through shooting his movie about the
assassination, for which he has staged an elaborate
re-creation of the event in Dallas.  But already the film (at
least an early draft of the script, which Stone has tried to
keep secret) has come under vigorous assault.  The Washington
Post attacked the movie's "errors and absurdities." Experts
on the assassination have voiced outrage at Stone's version
of events.  Stone has responded with dark hints of a
conspiracy to discredit his movie.  And who said the '60s
were over?

The hero of Stone's film, scheduled for release in December
by Warner Bros., is former New Orleans district attorney Jim
Garrison, a wide-eyed conspiracy buff who in 1969 put New
Orleans businessman Clay Shaw on trial for complicity in
Kennedy's murder. (The case ended in a quick acquittal.)
Stone's script, a version of which was obtained by TIME, is
based largely on Garrison's 1988 book, On the Trail of the
Assassins.  Garrison is considered somewhere near the far-out
fringe of conspiracy theorists, but Stone appears to have
bought his version virtually wholesale.  One need look no
further than the actor who will play Garrison: Hollywood's
reigning all-American hero Kevin Costner.

In the early draft of Stone's script (co-written with Zachary
Sklar, who edited Garrison's book), we learn that Oswald was
just a pawn in an elaborate plot that ranged from seedy gay
bars in the French Quarter to the corridors of power in
Washington.  We meet bizarre characters like David Ferrie, a
homosexual ex-airline pilot with a homemade wig and
greasepaint eyebrows who claimed involvement in the
conspiracy but died before he could testify.  We witness
shadowy meetings between Oswald and Jack Ruby before the
assassination.  We are told that as many as seven shots may
have been fired at Kennedy from three different directions --
none of them by Oswald.

The killing was planned, Garrison discovers in the film, by a
coalition that included the Mafia, the CIA and other
protectors of the military-industrial complex.  In a key
scene, the crusading D.A. has a rendezvous in Washington with
a mysterious unnamed figure who describes how security for
the President's visit to Dallas was slackened.  It was all
part of a plot, he tells Garrison, to eliminate Kennedy and
put Lyndon Johnson in office so that the Vietnam War could be
escalated. "This was a military-style ambush from start to
finish," Garrison tells his staff later, "a coup d'etat with
Lyndon waiting in the wings."

David Belin, former counsel to the Warren Commission and
author of two books on the assassination, calls the script "a
bunch of hokum." By ignoring key pieces of evidence and
misrepresenting others, Belin says, Stone casts doubt even on
issues that are relatively clear-cut, like Oswald's murder of
Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. (Oswald was identified as
the gunman at the scene by at least six eyewitnesses.) "It is
a shame that a man as talented as Stone has had to go to such
lengths to deceive the American public," says Belin.

In his article for the Post, George Lardner Jr., who covered
the Shaw trial and now specializes in national-security
issues, called Garrison's investigation "a fraud" and
attacked the script for such dubious scenes as one in which
Ferrie is murdered by two mysterious figures who force
medicine down his throat. (The New Orleans coroner ruled that
Ferrie died of natural causes, though two apparent suicide
notes were found.) Lardner also ridiculed the film's attempt
to explain away Garrison's botched prosecution of Shaw by
inventing a Garrison aide who turns out to be a mole for the
Feds aiming to sabotage the case.

Even critics of the Warren Commission find fault with Stone's
version of events.  Harold Weisberg, author of Whitewash, one
of the earliest attacks on the Warren Report, calls Stone's
script "a travesty" that dredges up bogus theories and
unfounded speculation.  Among them: the suggestion that three
hobos arrested near the assassination site were involved
(they were vagrants who had nothing to do with the
assassination, says Weisberg), and Garrison's "discovery"
that the route of Kennedy's motorcade had been changed at the
last minute (a phony charge, says Weisberg, that was based on
conflicting descriptions of the parade route in the Dallas
Morning News.

Stone, with some justification, has objected to his film's
being dissected even before it is finished.  The criticisms,
he says, are based on the first draft of a script that has
been substantially revised. (The Ferrie murder scene, for
example, has been eliminated.) Stone compares the Post's
attack on his film to the Hearst newspapers' efforts to
suppress Citizen Kane five decades ago. "This is a repeat
performance," says Stone. "But nothing is going to stop me
from finishing this movie." The director insists, moreover,
on his right to make a movie that expresses his view of a
critical historical event. "William Shakespeare made Richard
III into a bad guy.  Now the historians say he was wrong.
Does that mean Shakespeare shouldn't have written Richard
III?"

Stone appears to have less tolerance for others who want to
do the same thing.  According to Hollywood sources, the
director has worked hard to block a movie based on Don
DeLillo's 1988 book, Libra, a fictionalized account of the
assassination. "Stone has a right to make his film, but he
doesn't have a right to try and stop everyone else from
making their films," says Dale Pollock, president of A&M
Films, which has been trying to make the DeLillo movie.

Stone maintains that the controversy is not something he has
courted. "I'm not making this film for money," the director
says of his lavishly publicized epic starring Hollywood's
hottest leading man. "I want to pay homage to J.F.K., the
godfather of my generation." But if his film turns out to
distort history, he may wind up doing more harm than homage
to the memory of the fallen President.

CAPTION: Stone took great pains to re-create the
assassination scene in Dallas, with Steve Reed and Jodi
Farber portraying the President and the First Lady.  But
seven -- not three -- shots ring out, and conspirators seem
to be hiding under every bed.

CAPTION: See above.

Title:       Why we still care. (John F. Kennedy
             assassination)

Authors:     Grunwald, Lisa
Citation:    Life, Dec 1991 v14 n16 p34(10)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Conspiracy_Investigations
             United States. President's Commission on the
               Assassination of President John F.
               Kennedy_Public opinion
             JFK (Motion picture)_Production and direction

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination;  Stone,
             Oliver_Production and direction

Reference #: A11565510

=============================================================

Abstract: The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 has
          spawned an industry of conspiracy investigators and
          book writers. One conspiracy theory, based on the
          investigations of Jim Garrison, will be presented
          in 'JFK,' the new film by director Oliver Stone.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1991

It took just 5.6 seconds from the moment the first bullet hit
President Kennedy's neck to the moment the last bullet tore
off the top of his head.  In that time, the country lost a
leader and gained a martyr.  It lost a great source of its
faith and gained an even greater source of doubt. And it lost
the outcome of a hundred unmade decisions: the agenda in the
President's mind at the instant it ceased to be a mind --
what to do in Vietnam, in Cuba, with Khrushchev, Hoover,
Hoffa. It lost, in other words, the history that the man who
was killed would have helped to make.  And it gained a
different history, the 28 years that have passed since then.

It also gained something less important but equally
inescapable: a persistent cottage industry that has provided
work -- sometimes created careers -- for countless authors,
filmmakers, researchers and conspiracy buffs.  For nearly
three decades they have dismantled the assassination like a
dream, seeking and finding hidden images, secret symbols,
echoes of truths and, sometimes, truths.  Relentlessly, they
have pursued leads, analyzed evidence, interviewed witnesses,
learned the arcana of acoustics, forensics, photography.
Together, they have produced more than 600 books about the
assassination and more than a dozen television documentaries,
as well as novels, plays, miniseries, musicals, poems,
college courses, exhibits, lectures, newsletters and feature
films. The latest and most ballyhooed of the industry's
products is a movie, due out this month, by the
self-appointed chronicler of the '60s, Oliver Stone.

JFK was directed and cowritten by Stone, and ever since it
started filming in April on a closed set in Dallas,
bootlegged copies of its first-draft script have been
abundant -- and premature criticism of its contents
impassioned.  Articles this spring in The Washington Post,
The Chicago Tribune, Time and The New Orleans Times-Picayune
raised questions about Stone's accuracy and his motives.  The
Tribune's Jon Margolis called the script an "insult to
intelligence and decency." The Post's George Lardner Jr.
decried its many "errors and absurdities" in a lengthy
feature story titled "Dallas in Wonderland." Stone, who
created Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July and
The Doors, tends to make news whenever he makes movies.  He
has a gift not only for storytelling but also for hitting the
nation's nerve.  Still, the advance reaction to JFK has gone
beyond the usual hype.  One of the reasons seems to be that
he has cast the very credible Kevin Costner in the central
role of Jim Garrison, a controversial former New Orleans
district attorney who in 1969 attempted to convict a local
businessman named Clay Shaw of conspiracy to assassinate the
President.

Garrison, who raised eyebrows, tempers and some lingering
questions with his prosecution of Shaw, was generally
dismissed by the press as a publicity seeker -- and equally
praised by conspiracy researchers as a maverick.  The jury in
the six-week trial reached a not guilty verdict in less than
an hour.  But Garrison has held firm to his theory that Shaw
was part of a coup engineered by the covert action arm of the
CIA.  In his 1988 book, On the Trail of the Assassins, he
insisted that the cast of characters involved in the
conspiracy or cover-up ultimately included the CIA, the
Secret Service, LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, Earl Warren, the Dallas
police and just about everyone except Lee Harvey Oswald, who
he claimed was busy that day being framed.  As Garrison, now
70 and a retired state appeals court judge, has put it: "Lee
Oswald was totally, unequivocally, completely innocent of the
assassination, and the fact that history . . . has made a
villain of this young man who wanted nothing more than to be
a fine Marine is in some ways the greatest injustice of all."

Oliver Stone, 45, sits in a conference room at Skywalker
Sound, a large postproduction facility west of Los Angeles.
Along with a crew of 65, he has spent the last three months
working 16-hour days and trying to edit 120 hours of film
down to three.  His eyes are puffy, and his hair is wild, and
he looks very tired.  He is reminded about Jim Garrison's
words and acknowledges that though he's based much of his
film on Garrison's story and admires the man, he doesn't see
eye-to-eye with him on every point.  Stone doesn't, for
example, believe the CIA masterminded the plot.  He suspects
Army Intelligence was involved.  And he thinks of Lee Harvey
Oswald as "semi-innocent, which means semi-guilty." Garrison,
in his film, is a semi-fictional protagonist, "an underdog,"
according to Stone, whose goal is to seek the truth.  So just
how much of the real Jim Garrison and how much of his
perspective Stone has adopted won't be known until the movie
is released.  What is clear is that JFK is a conspiracy film
and that for the American people, 45 percent of whom were not
even born at the time of Kennedy's death, it has the
potential to become the version of history they take to be
history. "The best thing this movie could do for me," Stone
says, "is if it would exist as an alternate myth to the
Warren Commission myth, if it would be a beacon to another
generation that would think of the Kennedy killing always in
these new terms."

That prospect has alarmed even some long-standing members of
the assassination research community.  Harold Weisberg, 78,
the author of six books on the assassination, has gathered
some 250,000 documents through the Freedom of Information
Act.  He believes passionately that there was a conspiracy
but feels that the whole truth will never be known and fears
that Stone's movie will distort the established facts.
"Oliver Stone will do an influential job," says Weisberg,
"and the people are going to believe what he says.  You have
to know the subject to know what an atrocity this is."

Meanwhile, other assassination researchers -- even those who
might have been expected to resent Stone as a
Johnny-come-lately -- are greeting the prospect of his movie
with unconcealed delight. Says R. B. Cutler, the 78-year-old
publisher of a bimonthly newsletter called the Grassy Knoll
Gazette: "When the movie comes out, someone is going to stand
up in 1992 and say, `Hey, Bush, Oliver tells me Oswald didn't
do it alone.  Who the hell did?' " Mark Lane, whose new book,
Plausible Denial, points the finger at the CIA and is thus at
odds with some of Stone's views, nevertheless declares: "The
greatest contribution to a discussion in America about this
subject since the shot was fired is being made by Oliver
Stone.  He's placed it on the agenda, and I salute him." In
short, there is enthusiasm among many of the buffs for
anything that keeps interest in the assassination alive.

Since November 22, 1963, it has never really waned.  Despite
the Kennedy family's wishes, JFK remains the only former
President who is commemorated on the day of his death, not
his birth.  Every year, on the anniversary of the
assassination, a somewhat macabre crowd gathers to mourn and
reminisce at Dealey Plaza in Dallas.  Four million people
visit the grave at Arlington National Cemetery each year,
praying, reciting words from the great speeches, gazing upon
the eternal flame. John Metzler Jr., Arlington's
superintendent, receives dozens of letters addressed to
Kennedy in care of the cemetery from all over the country.
"People tell the President how much they like him," he says,
"and that they would like him to do things for them.  Others
just come to the site.  They get tears in their eyes.  Some
lay a single flower.  You can see it's a humbling time."

At the former Texas School Book Depository, from which Oswald
is said to have fired the fatal shots, a museum called The
Sixth Floor was opened in 1989.  For six dollars, a visitor
can hear an audiotape of interviews with witnesses, view
memorabilia from the '60s and book cartons that re-create the
sniper's perch.  As executive director of the exhibit, Bob
Hays sees the visitors and their emotion and says he is still
amazed by their intensity. "They come to question," he says,
"they come to remember, and in part, I think, they come to
heal."

The healing has to do with Camelot, a word that conjures a
host of pictures, a pang of idealism and of loss.  No matter
what the country is told about the real Jack Kennedy -- his
infidelities, his health problems, his crudeness, his
questionable World War II heroism, dubious Pulitzer Prize,
tainted Cook County votes -- the illusion is more powerful
than the disillusionment.  Even in a bad Kennedy year such as
this, when Ted and Joan and Willie fail to garner the kind of
headlines that the country still expects of them, America's
royal family remains indestructibly glamorous.  The main
reason is that its chief tragedy remains, like its victim,
larger than life, even larger than death.

Would we care as much if he had been less handsome?  If she
had been less beautiful?  If he hadn't had those children?
That speechwriter?  That voice?  Would we feel at all the
same if the press hadn't been so deferential, so polite, so
selective?  If he'd been killed at 55 or 60 instead of 46?
If he hadn't been killed but had died of old age?  Other
loved Presidents have died in office, even in this century;
when FDR was gone, the citizens wept in streets and crowded
bars.  But when we lost FDR we lost a father; when we lost
JFK we lost a son and brother, and, as with all such
premature, unnatural deaths, the grief was simply deeper, the
disbelief more profound.

Hence, the consumers for the Kennedy industry.  The expected
audience for Oliver Stone's film. The readers who have made
five books best-sellers in the last two years, as well as
dozens more in the past 28.  The endless stream of TV Jackies
and TV Jacks, the fake pink Chanel suits and fake Boston
accents.  And yes, the magazine covers.  Kennedys sell. "The
Kennedy story is inherently engaging because of what might
have been," says Kent Carroll, who at Carroll & Graf has
published four books on the assassination. "A young life was
snuffed out.  It's a real-life story.  Kennedy's
accomplishments as President were mediocre, but he's viewed
as being one of the great Presidents. It has to do with what
people want to believe he was.  He is the unfulfilled
promise." Even 20 years after Kennedy's death, a Harris
Survey found that a majority of Americans still felt "a deep
sense of grief" for the President and "miss[ed] him more" as
time went by.

Camelot remains the American Eden.  Though many of the
theorists are quick to assert that they are not blind to
Kennedy's faults, others seem less inclined to let go of the
legend.  As Jim Marrs writes in Crossfire, a kind of
compendium of assassination theories (and another book used
by Stone in the writing of his film): "I seek not only the
killers of President Kennedy, I seek the persons who killed
Camelot." Says Mark North, author of the newly published Act
of Treason (which blames the assassination on J. Edgar
Hoover): "My interest initially was historical -- trying to
set the record straight.  Then it became a question that the
memory of John Kennedy had been wronged.  People can say what
they want about him, about his philandering and the Bay of
Pigs, but he donated all his salary to charity, and he was an
honest man who had the country's interests at heart."

Penn Jones Jr., 77, may be the assassination researcher who
has taken Kennedy's death most personally.  Former publisher
of Texas's weekly Midlothian Mirror, Jones started in the
mid-'60s to question the official version of Kennedy's death
in the paper's editorials.  In subsequent years he published
both a newsletter (The Continuing Inquiry) and, using his own
money, a four-book series called Forgive My Grief.  Jones
believes the assassination was a military coup ordered by the
Joint Chiefs of Staff with the CIA's cooperation.  He
believes there were nine assassins that day in Dallas, one of
them concealed by a manhole cover.  Surrounded by portraits
of JFK and floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with assassination
books, tapes and mementos, he talks in his phoneless,
white-frame farmhouse in Waxahachie, a rustic town half an
hour south of Dallas. "Democracy died in Dealey Plaza," he
says sadly. "I love democracy. I loved Kennedy." His pain and
his work are shared by Elaine Kavanaugh Jones, 38, his
colleague since 1978 and wife since 1986 (they met on the
grassy knoll). "A lot of people study the assassination for
the mystery, the intrigue," she says, "but we do it because
we loved him.  He brought youth and wit to this country. He
made every single person believe they had an important part
in this country.  Now there's no hope."

In contrast to the Joneses, Oliver Stone is quick to say he
sees Kennedy's imperfections. "I was never a Kennedy lover
when he was alive," he says, "so I did not come to this with
a liberal ambulance-chasing knee-jerk reaction to the murder,
or saying he was some kind of god.  Kennedy was a man with
many flaws, and an ambivalent man.  I see him as a pragmatic
politician wanting to get elected and willing almost to sell
his mother to do so." Yet Stone, whose own experience as a
soldier in Vietnam has shaped much of his politics and his
art, also sees the dead President as the first great victim
of that war. "Kennedy was a man who achieved a vision and by
the end of his thousand days in office was becoming less of a
cold warrior and more of a statesman and peacemaker," Stone
says. "He told [Senators] Mike Mansfield and Wayne Morse and
he told [aide] Kenny O'Donnell that he was going to withdraw
all the troops after he was reelected.  I have a very strong
feeling that if Kennedy had lived, the Vietnam war as we knew
it would never have happened.  There were sinister forces at
work that killed him because he was seeking to change
things." The production company Stone set up for this film is
called Camelot.

But Camelot alone does not explain the assassination
industry.  Not everyone needs a hero; some people need a
villain.  For some, conspiracy theories can answer a deeply
personal need to make sense of an event that, if the official
version were true, would be too vast and too random to
fathom.  As Dr. James W. Pennebaker, a Dallas psychologist
who specializes in studying the effects of traumatic events
on communities, puts it: "It doesn't make sense to people
that a partially deranged man would have done this.  It
doesn't make sense that Elvis could have just died." The fact
that a single madman could change the world in a single
moment can be more unsettling than the prospect of an
organized action, however corrupt.  The organization suggests
control; the madman suggests chaos.

Mark Lane begs to differ. "That's just cheap psychology," he
argues, "a mystical concept imposed upon us by people who've
refused to look at the facts." But Harold Weisberg  he
argues, "a mystical concept imposed upon us by people who've
refused to look at the facts." But Harold Weisberg is one
researcher who agrees. "People want to give meaning to a
random event like the assassination," he suggests.  Sayst
Stone: "[The press] demeans Kennedy, they trivialize history
by making November 22, 1963, into a car accident.  A
thunderbolt came down from the sky and knocked off this guy.
O.K., we lost him, grieve a bit, have your three days of
grief, and then move on.  That's what they would like us to
believe.  Well, it wasn't an accident."

Whether inspired by goodness or convinced of evil, the
assassination theorists share an extraordinary intensity.
David Lifton, author of the 1981 best-selling Best Evidence,
not only remembers where he was when he heard the news of
JFK's death; he remembers where he was when he decided to
begin researching it.  Lifton's theory, one of the most
sensational, is that JFK's body was surgically altered to
conceal the evidence that he'd been shot from the front. "It
was a night in October of 1966 when I figured out that the
body must have been altered," he says. "I went to a coffee
shop with my girlfriend.  I took a napkin and wrote down my
two choices.  One was to complete my graduate studies and get
a master's degree at Cornell.  The other was to follow up
this evidence, to do what I was burning to do.  I saved the
napkin in a folder somewhere.  I ended up in an apartment
living with filing cabinets.  I had no idea then that the
book would take me fifteen years.  But I had the sense that I
was really onto something.  I knew it couldn't wait." Says
Mark North, who started his career as a tax attorney: "My
father fought in the battle of Iwo Jima, my brother in
Vietnam.  I was an Eagle Scout.  It bothered me that this
could happen in my country."

Oliver Stone's intensity about the assassination, like his
interpretation of it, has evolved. He was a senior in high
school the day that Kennedy was shot. "I was just on a lunch
break or something, and I remember that somebody came and
knocked at the door.  Just a quiet moment.  And actually I
didn't realize at the time that my life had changed forever."
He was not, he says, a buff.  He accepted the theory that
Oswald was the lone gunman.  But three years ago, while
finishing Born on the Fourth of July in the Far East, Stone
read Jim Garrison's book. "I was very shaken by it," he
recalls. "I was deeply, deeply moved and appalled, and I
optioned the book myself.  I wanted to get this story out."

With Garrison's editor, Zachary Sklar, serving as coauthor,
Stone immersed himself in the process of research and writing
-- and suddenly found himself deluged by the buff community.
"They lined up," he says, "like hogs at a trough.  Not all,
but some.  They wanted to be consulted or to have their
theories included, and we could not do that.  There are too
many books and too many researchers.  But because we were a
movie, we were considered the golden goose."

Stone says his emotions have changed in the course of the
project. "Much of my initial rage went into the
script-writing process," he says, "and by the time you're
shooting, so many other people are involved that you're
sharing that kind of anger; you're not carrying the burden by
yourself.  It's a job, and you do it professionally." Still,
it is impossible to talk to Stone without being struck by his
anger.  He is angry at the government, which he perceives as
dishonest; at some of the research community, which he
perceives as envious; and at most of the press, which he
perceives alternately as blind and blinding.  His response to
his early critics in the press was to call them "Doberman
pinschers trained to protect the government." "The media," he
says, "would like to think that they can control the people,
but I think the people, if they turn out for the movie, will
show that they care.  And they're not going to buy the
official version."

He can sound close to delusion, and he knows it. "I'm not
going to be classified as a paranoid," he says. "But I do see
a special interest -- a vested interest -- in certain
publications to maintain the official Warren Commission
theory." Asked if he dreams of the assassination, he answers,
"If I say yes, that could be taken negatively.  That could be
pictured as me seeing a shooter behind every bush." He wants
to be clear that he is not a kook. "I had much anxiety over
this film," he says. "I've had many
three-o'clock-in-the-morning attacks, doubts, uncertainties.
It probably has aged me and certainly has exhausted me.  And
I certainly hold the possibility that I could be dead wrong
in my head.  I have that capacity.  To look at myself and
laugh and say, `Maybe Oswald is what everyone thinks he was,
and I'm on the longest, goofiest spin in history -- in my
history.' "

But no.  Stone's imagery for Kennedy, while not Arthurian,
remains regal, and his sense of injustice sublime. "The
Kennedy myth is a bit like America's Hamlet story," he says.
"Kennedy is the king who was murdered.  There's been an ugly
succession of kings in this country, none of whom have
worked, really worked.  And we, the American people, are like
Hamlet before the first act, waiting to find out that there
is a false king who sits on the throne."

In Hamlet, of course, the false king was also the murderer,
and even Stone does not go as far as some others, who trace a
CIA plot from the Bay of Pigs to Watergate to George Bush.
Though Stone believes that one person did know of the whole
assassination plan, he also says that only a viewer of his
movie who is "very alert" will be able to say who that person
is.  His film, he insists, doesn't solve the murder; he's not
sure that the murder can ever be solved. "I'm not in the
business of bringing charges and trying to make a case in a
court of law in the light of day," he says.

But mystery has a rich tendency to breed conspiracy theories.
Since 1966, when the first attacks on the Warren Commission
report were made, polls conducted by organizations including
Gallup, Harris and The Washington Post have consistently
shown that a majority of Americans (56 percent in the most
recent sampling) believe there was some kind of conspiracy
behind the assassination.  A lot of their doubts about the
official version have been inspired by other people's
convictions; like the best preachers and politicians, the
conspiracy theorists can often sway by the sheer force of
their faith.  And with the exception of David W. Belin, a
former counsel to the Warren Commission and the author of two
books that support its methods and findings, the buffs have
generally been the noisemakers.  It is difficult to confront
their exhortations without being somewhat seduced.

It is also difficult to dismiss some of their questions.  Why
weren't more of the witnesses interviewed by the Warren
Commission?  How could one bullet have pierced JFK's back and
neck, then John Connally's chest, wrist and hand, and ended
up on the governor's stretcher virtually pristine? Why wasn't
Oswald, a known supporter of Castro, watched by federal
agents?  Why, after his arrest, did he insist upon his
innocence and call himself a patsy?  Why did more than 50
witnesses say they thought the shots had come not from the
Book Depository behind the President but from the infamous
grassy knoll ahead?  Why, when the alleged lone gunman was
supposed to have fired from behind JFK, does the crucial
footage shot by Abraham Zapruder seem to show him recoiling
backward?  The answers to such questions, as provided by the
conspiracy buffs, are unfortunately never simple and, lacking
evidence, not conclusive.

But the suggestions of a conspiracy were sufficiently
compelling to inspire an official reopening of the case by
the House of Representatives in 1976.  After two and a half
years of study, at a cost of $5.4 million, the House Select
Committee on Assassinations concluded that "President John F.
Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a
conspiracy." Part of the evidence: a recording from a
motorcade policeman's Dictabelt that seemed to reveal that
there had been four shots, not three.  In 1988 the Justice
Department concluded that the acoustical evidence on which
the committee had based its conclusion had been
misinterpreted.  The Warren Commission findings stood, but so
did the controversy.  Says Jim Marrs: "It's the greatest
murder mystery ever." Says David Belin: "It was the crime of
the century." Says Stone: "The mystery has never been laid to
rest."

The true-crime nature of the assassination may be the most
seductive part of all.  In 1966, when Norman Mailer reviewed
Mark Lane's first book, he predicted that the question marks
would lure a lot of amateur Sherlock Holmeses to Dealey
Plaza: " . . . plans will be made and money saved to make a
trip to Dallas, which will become a shrine for all the unborn
Baker Street Irregulars of the world."

And that, of course, is precisely what has happened.  Indeed,
the Grassy Knoll Gazette's motto is a quote from Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle: "When you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
Even the buffs' names for the various characters in Dealey
Plaza would not seem out of place in one of Conan Doyle's
stories: Umbrella Man, Badge Man, Black Dog Man and so on.
Erik Rinne, a Dallas teacher and researcher who believes that
any one of 10 theories might explain the assassination, says:
"I do the research for the lust of knowing.  I want to know
the unknown -- or the unknowable.  It's like a Rubik's Cube.
It's a labyrinth.  It's like the mystery of the pyramids or
Jack the Ripper." Rinne's course at Eastfield College near
Dallas is called "Who Shot JFK?", and he always begins the
class by telling his students he doesn't have all the
answers. "It would be a letdown if this were solved," he
concedes. "It's terrible to say, but this is something that
could become a parlor game in twenty years." (In one case, it
already has.  A year ago a small California company came out
with Coup D'Etat: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
Trading Cards, each card featuring a major player, theory or
event in the case.

At the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas, Larry
N. Howard, 46, oversees an unofficial repository of tapes,
artifacts, government documents and published material.  His
office is crowded with books and tapes about the
assassination, and he has a large ring notebook filled with
photos of the JFK set, where he worked as a consultant: There
is Howard with Oliver Stone, Howard with Kevin Costner.  He's
proud to show it to visitors.  Every day he receives a stack
of pink phone message slips from researchers wanting to pass
on information or ask questions about the assassination.  He
estimates that some 100 people around the country are still
actively exploring the crime.  Many of them visit his center,
which stays open late at night and on weekends.  He and his
two full-time colleagues, working with a half dozen
volunteers, charge a five-dollar admission fee and make
additional money from the sale of books and T-shirts.  Howard
and his staff are determined to solve the Kennedy murder.
"We're close," he says portentously. "We're very close."

Last month Howard and the Information Center sponsored a
three-day assassination symposium at Dallas's Hyatt Regency.
The agenda included a book fair, a tour of the motorcade
route and seminars featuring eyewitnesses and authors.
"Relive History," the brochure suggested.  Hundreds were
planning to do just that: As long as there are unknowns,
there is reason for hope.  Says Hugh Forrest, one of the
symposium's organizers: "Barring the solution of the
assassination, we plan to make this an annual event."

A CONSPIRACY LEXICON

In 1964 the President's Commission on the Assassination of
President Kennedy, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren,
published its findings after ten and a half months of
investigation.  Lee Harvey Oswald, the commission said, a man
who "showed disdain for democracy, capitalism, and American
society in general," had acted alone, firing three shots from
the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.
Eighty minutes after the assassination, Oswald was arrested
for the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit; 12 hours later he was
charged with JFK's murder; and two days after that, he was
killed in custody, supposedly on impulse, by a grief-stricken
Jack Ruby.  Assassination students -- as well as a consistent
majority of the American public -- have viewed the Warren
Commission report as being anywhere from incomplete to
fantastic.  Their doubts have inspired a host of alternate
theories with a singular cast of characters and a sometimes
specialized vocabulary.

BABUSHKA LADY

An eyewitness, never interviewed by the Warren Commission,
who was wearing a scarf and filming the motorcade as the
shots were fired.  In the '70s a woman named Beverly Oliver
identified herself as the Babushka Lady and said that her
film, which showed the grassy knoll, had been taken by FBI
agents and never returned.

BADGE MAN

One of the purported grassy knoll assailants.  In a blowup of
a tiny section of a Polaroid photograph, some researchers see
the image of a man with a badge on one shoulder and a flash
of light before him.

BANISTER, GUY

A former FBI agent and anti-Castro activist.  Employing David
Ferrie, he worked at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, the
address on the pro-Castro leaflets Oswald had passed out
several months before the shooting.

BLACK DOG MAN

Another photograph of the scene reveals a triangular black
patch behind the concrete wall on the grassy knoll.  Some
researchers say the shape is a man with a gun.  Members of
the 1976 House Assassinations Committee felt that the dark
patch looked like a dog-shaped blur.

CIA CONSPIRACY THEORY

The supposed motivation was three-fold.  First, a desire on
the part of certain agents to avenge what they saw as their
disgrace at the Bay of Pigs.  Second, a desire to thwart
JFK's intention to withdraw advisers from Vietnam.  And
third, a desire for self-preservation in light of his
purported plan to eliminate the agency.

FERRIE, DAVID

A New Orleans pilot and private eye -- according to some a
CIA operative, to others a Mafia contact.  Ferrie (who was
left totally hairless by a disease) had known Oswald in the
mid-'50s and is alleged to have lured him into the
conspiracy.  Ferrie died in 1967, apparently of a ruptured
blood vessel, days after being named by District Attorney Jim
Garrison as a possible conspirator in JFK's killing.  His
death is one of many considered mysterious by assassination
buffs.

FRAME 313

The frame of the home movie (page 35) taken by Abraham
Zapruder, in which the fatal shot shatters JFK's head.

FRENCH CONNECTION THEORY

Suggests that at least one of the assassins was a French
hitman working for the CIA.

GARRISON, JIM

Former New Orleans district attorney, he described David
Ferrie as "one of history's most important individuals" and
had, until the suspect's death, intended to prosecute him.
Instead, he set his sights on businessman Clay Shaw, who was
found not guilty of conspiracy in 1969.

GRASSY KNOLL

The sloping hill from which many theorists claim the fatal
shot was fired.  Most witnesses did say they thought the
shots had come from this direction, but none saw a gunman
shooting.

HOOVER, J. EDGAR

Mark North's Act of Treason claims that FBI Director Hoover
had learned of a Mafia contract that had been put on JFK in
September 1962.  His "act of treason" was his failure to
inform the Secret Service or his superiors in the Justice
Department about the threat.  According to North, Hoover's
motive was self-preservation: "As a result . . .  President
Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson became President, and the
director obtained an Executive Order, on May 8, 1964, waiving
his compulsory retirement."

JOHNSON, LYNDON BAINES

Few buffs suggest that LBJ was directly involved in planning
the assassination, but many believe that he may have been
part of a vast cover-up.

MAFIA THEORY

Both Oswald and Jack Ruby have been shown to have had
connections to organized crime.  In addition, Louisiana mob
boss Carlos Marcello apparently thought it a betrayal that
the CIA under JFK would hire the Mafia to assassinate Castro
while JFK allowed Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, to
crack down on the mob.  Marcello is said to have sworn
vengeance on RFK.  So why assassinate JFK? "If you want to
kill a dog," Marcello reportedly said, "you don't cut off the
tail, you cut off the head." But some theorists have the mob
just carrying out CIA orders.

MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX THEORY

The interpretation of the assassination that focuses on
perceived vested interests of big business and the military.
Many assassination researchers see an attempt at
self-preservation in JFK's destruction.  According to them,
Kennedy's acceptance of a nuclear test ban, his perceived
softening toward the U.S.S.R. and Cuba, and his reassessment
of the U.S. presence in Vietnam all constituted an economic
and moral threat.

PRISTINE BULLET

The bullet that ended up on John Connally's stretcher,
virtually unmarked, and was said by the Warren Commission to
have injured both JFK and the Texas governor.

RUBY, JACK

The Dallas nightclub owner who shot Oswald in the basement of
the Dallas police station.  The Warren report saw no
"significant link" between Ruby and organized crime, but by
the time of the House investigation, Ruby's mob connections
were taken more seriously.  Though he never confessed to
having had any part in a conspiracy, he did ask Earl Warren,
"If you felt your life was in danger . . . wouldn't you be
reluctant to go on speaking?" Ruby tried several times to
kill himself in prison, once by running headlong into a wall.
He died of cancer in prison in 1967, having told guards he
had been injected with cancer-causing agents.

THREE TRAMPS

Among the suspects arrested near Dealey Plaza were three men
dressed in shabby clothing who seemed to be vagrants.
Released soon after their arrest, they were never
conclusively identified. Some researchers recognize, in one
of the tramps, the face of Charles V. Harrelson, a convicted
hitman.  Harrelson (who is the father of Cheers star Woody
Harrelson) is in prison for murder; while conceding his
resemblance to the "tramp," he denies having been in Dealey
Plaza that day.

TWO-COFFINS THEORY

David Lifton's Best Evidence alleged that the coffin taken
from Air Force One and driven to Bethesda Naval Medical
Center was empty, and that a second coffin, bearing the
President, was detoured to an unknown location, where proof
that the fatal shot had come from the front was concealed.
According to Lifton, the altered body actually arrived at
Bethesda before the empty coffin; it was being prepared for
autopsy, he claims, before the coffin had arrived.

TWO-OSWALDS THEORY

Questions about the true identity of Lee Harvey Oswald led
Michael Eddowes, a British researcher, to publish The Oswald
File in 1977, in which he claimed that the Oswald born in New
Orleans in 1939 was captured by Soviets in 1959.  According
to Eddowes, JFK was killed by a KGB agent, an Oswald
look-alike.  Eddowes's evidence -- mostly discrepancies among
medical reports --led to Oswald's exhumation in 1981.  The
body was positively identified as Oswald's.  But two Dallas
funeral directors now claim that the exhumed body is not the
one they buried in 1963.

UMBRELLA MAN

He was standing by a Dealey Plaza freeway sign, beneath an
open umbrella on a sunny day.  One theory: The umbrella was a
device that fired a paralyzing dart into JFK's neck.
Another: The umbrella was a sign to JFK that he was being
killed by disgruntled anti-Castro agents who had hoped vainly
for "an umbrella" of air protection during the Bay of Pigs
invasion.

ZAPRUDER, ABRAHAM

The Dallas clothing manufacturer who stood near a concrete
wall on the grassy knoll and filmed the most famous footage
in history.  Some researchers still claim that LIFE, which
purchased the film the day after the assassination, kept its
most controversial contents from the public until the 1970s,
either in outright collusion with the government or in a
misguided attempt to shield the public from its grotesque
contents.  In fact, LIFE published even the most grisly of
the movie frames, Frame 313, on October 2, 1964.

CAPTION: JFK WHY WE STILL CARE A new movie about the
assassination reopens an old controversy

CAPTION: "We should know," says Oliver Stone, "the way
politics is played, the way kings are killed."

CAPTION: Mark Lane's new book will be his last on the
assassination. "I've made my contribution," he says.

CAPTION: Penn Jones Jr. has been a researcher since the '60s.
"I think there were nine guns fired at JFK," he says, "and it
was a beautiful coup d'etat."

CAPTION: Stone's filming began with the motorcade in Dealey
Plaza, where, with eerie precision, he re-created the events
of November 22, 1963, in more detail than ever before.

CAPTION: Bob Hays oversees The Sixth Floor in Dallas, where
visitors can view the motorcade route.

CAPTION: Larry Howard's Assassination Information Center
stays open late at night and on weekends.

Title:       Plunging into the labyrinth. (director Oliver
             Stone) (Interview)
Citation:    Time, Dec 23, 1991 v138 n25 p74(3)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Motion picture producers and
               directors_Interviews
             JFK (Motion picture)_Production and direction

People:      Stone, Oliver_Interviews;  Kennedy, John
             F._Assassination

Reference #: A11687635

=============================================================

Abstract: Oliver Stone believes there was a conspiracy to
          kill John F. Kennedy, and has set out to show it in
          his new film 'JFK.' The director explains why he
          believes important facts were covered up.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1991

Q.  In JFK you commingle real news footage with re-created
historical scenes.  Do you consider the film a docudrama, a
work of fact or fiction?

A.  Am I a zebra?  Am I a giraffe?  What color are my spots?
These are categorizations, and I tend to resist them.  During
the trial Jim Garrison says, let's speculate for a moment
what happened that day.  He goes on to speculate as to the
events as they might have happened with more than one
shooter.  So I'm giving you a detailed outlaw history or
counter-myth.  A myth represents the true inner spiritual
meaning of an event.  I think the Warren Commission was a
myth, and I think this movie, hopefully, if it's accepted by
the public, will at least move people away from the Warren
Commission and consider the possibility that there was a coup
d'etat that removed President Kennedy.

Q.  Do you feel you as a filmmaker have a responsibility to
historical fact?

A.  Whenever you start to dictate to an artist his "social
responsibility" you get into an area of censorship.  I think
the artist has the right to interpret and reinterpret history
and the events of his time.  It's up to the artist himself to
determine his own ethics by his own conscience.

Q.  Are you comfortable with this film in your own
conscience?

A.  Totally.  I dispute the "objective" version of events in
Dealey Plaza as stated by the Warren Commission.  The entire
Warren Commission Report, 26 volumes, is a rat's nest of
conflicting facts, and that's been pointed out not just by me
but by many critics before me.

Q.  Is it accurate to say that you think the assassinations
of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are
linked?

A.  I think the removal of the three most progressive leaders
of the '60s during a time of bitterness and dissension and
civil war in this country is very much tied into the
assassination.  I use the term civil war in its full
implications, going back to the 1960s, where we were divided
between hawks and doves, hippies and straights.  These three
leaders were pulling out of the war in Vietnam and shaking up
the country.  Civil rights, the cold war itself, everything
was in question. There's no doubt that these three killings
are linked, and it worked.  That's what's amazing.  They
pulled it off.

Q.  Who's "they"?  Who do you think has profited from the
Kennedy and King assassinations?

A.  As shown in the movie, the money that was involved was
enormous by any standard.  Cold war money.  It's not just
Vietnam money.  It's military-industrial money.  It's nuclear
money.  It's the American war economy that Eisenhower warned
us about, that came into being in this country in the 1940s,
after World War II.  It's also the continuation of the covert
state, the invisible government that operates in this country
and seems to be an unelected parallel government to our
legitimate government.  The CIA and military intelligence all
got out of hand somewhere in the 1960s.  It suddenly reached
another level, where the concept of assassination -- the wet
affair, liquidation -- became the vogue.

Q.  When you say a parallel government, do you mean a
specific arm of the Executive Branch, like "special ops"?

A.  It's a moving, fluid thing, a series of forces at play.
It's not necessarily individuals. Military-industrial
interests are at stake.  That puts into play certain forces.
We have had many incidents recently, with Oliver North, with
Richard Secord, the whole Iran-contra business.  We've seen
the scale on which arms are moved around the world.  We've
seen secret deals.  There's more going on than ever meets the
eye, and there's more going on than is ever written about in
the newspapers.

Q.  Why did you pick Garrison as the focal point of JFK?

A.  Because in Jim I found a worthy protagonist, a vehicle to
include all the research that was done in the case.  I
respect Jim.  He put himself out there and led with his chin.
His was a flawed investigation, but he did his best.  He was
one of a very few who early on said that the government did
it.  Which was an astounding statement in 1967, a very scary
one.

Q.  It's still an astounding statement.  Americans have the
strong sense that their government is their government.  They
don't have the sense that, say, the Russians have had for
generations, that the government belongs to the people who
have seized power.

A.  You really think that?  Maybe you're right.  I may be in
the minority.  I just think the American people smell a rat.

Q.  Given our motley society, why couldn't a lone gunman have
shot Kennedy?  Why does it have to be a conspiracy?

A.  Assassins through history have always proclaimed their
act.  They've been proud of it. They've killed for a
political reason.  But Oswald always said, "I didn't do it.
I'm a patsy." And we have an enormous accumulation of
physical evidence that makes it very difficult to buy that
one gunman could have done that kind of shooting job.

Q.  You stood in the window with that rifle and worked the
bolt?

A.  Not only that, but we created the motorcade.  We had a
massive motorcade moving through that ravine called Dealey
Plaza.  We fired.  We heard the shots and echoes too.  We did
more of an enactment than the FBI ever did, and by the way,
their best marksmen were never able to match Oswald's feat.

Q.  In JFK the media, including TIME and LIFE, cover up the
assassination conspiracy.  Do you truly believe the press was
CIA-infiltrated?

A.  I feel that the American reaction to the crime was to
simplify it, to deal with good guys and bad guys and a lone
gunman and John Wayne theatrics.  The European press was much
more skeptical, because they saw in this assassination
political forces at play.  The press in fact never did ask
why Kennedy was killed.  They immediately were, in a sense,
trivialized by the questions of who and how.  It all became a
matter of scenery -- Oswald, Ruby.  Scenery distracts from
the essential questions.  Who benefited?  Who had the power
to cover it up?  I don't point the finger of evil intention,
but it is documented that the agency spent quite a bit of
money to keep a leg up in journalism, that there were a lot
of people working on their payroll.

Q.  Specifically what evidence do you believe the press
covered up?

A.  Among other things, you have LIFE buying the Zapruder
film and burying it and not showing it to the American
public.* Eventually it was made available, but only 12 years
later.  Garrison was the first one, I think, to get it out in
a public forum with the trial in 1969.  He subpoenaed
Time-Life and succeeded in getting the film shown to a
limited audience.

Q.  What is the importance of the Zapruder film?

A.  I think the most conclusive thing it shows is the fatal
head shot coming from the front, from the fence.  In
addition, it shows the time frame of the shots, which makes
it very difficult to believe Oswald fired three shots in 5.6
seconds.  And of course it raises the whole question of how
Connally and Kennedy were hit by the same bullet.

Q.  From what you're saying, you would have 400 of the most
notable media people in America knowing about a conspiracy to
kill Kennedy.

A.  I don't know that 400 people have to know anything.  I
think there is such a form of informational equilibrium that
preserves the status quo that you can virtually call it
silent consent.

Q.  Why did you put famous actors -- Jack Lemmon, Walter
Matthau, Donald Sutherland, John Candy, Ed Asner -- into
small roles?

A.  They help us along the road because the material might be
in some sense dry and arcane to many people.  Each actor has
a little riddle or an obstacle for Garrison, who has to work
his way around it to move farther into the heart of the
labyrinth, where the Cretan Minotaur lives.

Q.  Isn't Garrison's wife, the character played by Sissy
Spacek, simplified in the film?

A.  I didn't misinterpret his wife at all.  That's the way
she was.  Garrison's investigation threatened her family
life.  They had five kids, and he was not home.  We didn't
practice politically correct feminism to try to make her into
something she was not.  What we did -- you could fault me for
it -- was put a woman D.A. into his staff.  He did not have a
woman D.A.

Q.  Do you expect to see negative reaction to JFK?

A.  I think older white males will have a major problem with
it. I think the younger generation will be more open.

Q.  The older generation has a memory of the event, the
younger generation doesn't.  What is your sense of
responsibility to this younger, video generation, which will
accept your movie as truth and history?

A.  We did a lot of homework.  I had a dozen technical
advisers going over the script with a fine-tooth comb.
Everything that we have in there we stand behind. What is
speculation is clearly speculation.  We did not throw in any
facts that we felt were wrong.  I did make some composites.
I've admitted that.  I made it very clear [in interviews],
for example, that Garrison never really met with the
character called "X," played by Donald Sutherland, who
explains the dimensions of the CIA conspiracy.

Q.  You have drawn together many threads of conspiratorial
theory in the film.  Are you endorsing everything or simply
advancing them as possibilities?

A.  I think I pulled back in the movie from some of my own
beliefs and probably softened some of my own conclusions for
fear of seeming too aggressive and bullying about
information.

Q.  With this film, aren't you joining the ranks of the
conspiracy industry and commercializing a national tragedy?

A.  It's a cottage industry but not necessarily a very
lucrative one.  The movie faces commercial risk.  It has to
appeal on a large level to justify itself.

Q.  From many of your films it seems you see America as an
ugly, disturbed country populated with sinister characters.

A.  Talk Radio is the darkest film I've made, but I don't
personally feel that way about America.  I have a lot more
hope for America.  I see it as a totally homogeneous land,
and I love its vastness and its freedom.  My mother is
French.  She was an immigrant who came over here in 1946. In
a sense I'm half immigrant.  I think that the best part of
America is its lack of pretension and snobbism.  If anything,
in my work I've tried to veer away from the elites that I
think have corrupted and made cynical the American Dream.  I
hark back to an immigrant belief in the goodness of this
country.  I find it coming still from Asia, Mexico, Latin
America, Europe.  I think movies in a sense thrive on that
democracy.

Q.  Where were you on Nov.  22, 1963?

A.  In my room during a lunch break at the Hill School in
Pennsylvania.  My reaction was very similar to Jim's in the
movie.  A fellow student ran into the room and said, "They
just shot the President." It was shocking to me because
Kennedy was a handsome young man.  I loved his rhetoric.
Politically, I was against him because I was for Nixon and
Goldwater.  But in my heart I could not help being moved by
his charisma.  I was very sad for the family.  We watched TV
the whole weekend, just like in the movie.  Then we moved on
with our lives.  We didn't really think about it.  That was
the point.

Q.  When did you begin to develop an intuition that maybe it
wasn't Oswald alone, that maybe there was a conspiracy?

A.  I began to distrust the government through my Vietnam
experience, when I started to see the degree of lying and
corruption that was going on.  When I came back from the war,
I began to redefine the way I had grown up.  I started
writing screenplays more aggressively protesting the
authority of this government.  I wrote Platoon and Born on
the Fourth of July.  I had heard the Oswald stories, but I
had honestly been defeated by the size of the literature, and
I didn't see its implications in my life, as to how it
affected the beginnings of the Vietnam War.  And then
Garrison's book was given to me.  I read it and saw its
implications as a thriller -- a whydunit.

Q.  You have been called a chronicler of the '60s and the
last of the '60s radicals.  What does the '60s mean to you?

A.  First of all, I was never a radical in the '60s.  I was,
if anything, very straight.  I went to school.  I went to
Vietnam.  I was very slow in coming around.  I do think the
'60s is a determinant decade for the '90s, because people in
my generation -- I'm 45 now -- are coming to power.  We're
the next power base of this country.  We all grew up in the
cold war.  We were born in the dawn of the nuclear age.  So
the '60s is really determining what's going to happen in the
'90s.

Q.  You once said that Kennedy's assassination spawned the
race riots, the hippie movement, organized protests and the
drug culture.  Do you think his death alone was responsible
for this tide?

A.  Yes, in a metaphorical sense.  I think there was an
erosion of trust in the government on the subconscious level.
On the conscious level, we moved on.  We buried Oswald and
got rid of Ruby. The nightmare went away.  But subconsciously
the major fissure had occurred.  Historians in the 21st
century are going to point to this as a key moment in
American history.

Q.  Quite apart from whether there was a small, limited
conspiracy, isn't the movie saying that it was in the general
interest of Lyndon Johnson that Kennedy be assassinated and
the war in Vietnam go forward?

A.  Kings are killed.  It is the nature of political powers.
I have no problem believing this. I can see where certain
people do, and I can see where you might think I'm crazy.
The film is a bit subversive in its approach.  But a film can
often be subversive to the subconscious.  It comes out and
it's often criticized and reviled, but it lasts.  It's sort
of like a tsunami wave.  It starts out miles and miles from
the beach.  You hear a noise that just moves fast under the
water.  Then without warning it hits the beach, an explosion.
Obviously, this film is going to be denied; there will be
some decrying and reviling.  All the errors are going to be
attacked.  It will be discredited.  Yet it will survive.

FOOTNOTE: * In fact Life printed the most relevant still
frames in its next issue.  But at the request of Zapruder,
who feared "exploitation" of the tragedy, it did not allow
the film to be shown as a moving image.  In 1975 Life sold
the film back to the Zapruder family for $1.

CAPTION: Disenchanted by the war in Vietnam, the director
aggressively questions governmental authority

CAPTION: On location in Dallas, at the Texas School Book
Depository

Title:       Who killed J.F.K.? (film maker Oliver Stone's
             'JFK')

Authors:     Corliss, Richard
Citation:    Time, Dec 23, 1991 v138 n25 p66(5)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Motion pictures_Production and direction
             Conspiracies_Investigations
             JFK (Motion picture)_Production and direction

People:      Stone, Oliver_Production and direction;
             Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A11687625

=============================================================

Abstract: Oliver Stone's new movie 'JFK' will create renewed
          interest in conspiracy theories about the
          assassination of John F. Kennedy. Various
          conspiracy theories are described, in addition to
          details about the production of the film.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1991

J.F.K. blown away,

What else do I have to say?

-- Billy Joel,

We Didn't Start the Fire

On Nov.  22, 1963, somebody blasted the skull of America
open. In a few seconds of rifle fire in Dallas' Dealey Plaza,
a time warp gaped.  Slapped out of a pretty postwar reverie,
we screamed bloody murder.

Oliver Stone screams bloody murder for a living.  In his
screenplays for Midnight Express and Scarface, he drew
nightscapes of drug paranoia and police brutality.  As
writer-director of Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July,
the Vietnam vet exorcised his demons by portraying the war as
a rite of passage -- to fratricide.  In Talk Radio he
suggested that the penalty for a showman's reckless truth
telling was to be killed by his audience.  Jim Morrison, in
The Doors, pays a similar fee for fame; the poet's capricious
muse drives him to drugs, madness, death.  Oddly enough,
Stone's tortured artistic mission -- dispensing downers to a
movie public famously addicted to escapism -- has its upside.
He pours so much dramatic juice into the hemlock blender that
folks go to his films, and official Hollywood has rewarded
Stone with three Oscars.

This past was prologue to his most outsize challenge:
explaining the Kennedy assassination to his own satisfaction.
Or anyone else's.  JFK, the electrifying melodrama opening
nationwide this week, attracted brickbats months ago when a
long article in the Washington Post cataloged historical
"errors and absurdities" in Stone and Zachary Sklar's
screenplay.  Assassination scholars ragged Stone for his
naivete, his use of discredited testimony, his reliance on
suspect "experts." A TIME critic said that if Stone's film
"turns out to distort history, he may wind up doing more harm
than homage to the memory of the fallen President." Tom
Wicker, a New York Times columnist, has seen the film and
believes it does all that and worse.  He calls JFK "paranoid
and fantastic," full of "wild assertions" and propagating an
idea that, "if widely accepted, would be contemptuous of the
very constitutional government Mr. Stone's film purports to
uphold."

Anybody want to see this movie?  Warner Bros. hopes so; the
studio (whose parent company also owns TIME) helped foot
JFK's $40 million tab.  It is also counting on Kevin Costner,
America's No. 1 homegrown movie star, to lure audiences to
what is at heart a high-voltage civics quiz.  Though he
doesn't necessarily agree with every notion floated in the
film, Costner is happy to play front man for Stone. "Oliver's
a patriot," he says. "And I believe with him that the impact
of this movie will be liberating.  Any part of the truth --
any discussion of what could be the truth -- can only make us
freer."

But Costner's coiled heroic presence is one more source of
controversy, for the liberal icon of Dances with Wolves and
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is playing Jim Garrison, who as
New Orleans district attorney in the late '60s prosecuted the
only Kennedy assassination case that ever went to trial.
And, quickly, out the window.  The jury found the defendant,
businessman Clay Shaw, not guilty in less time than last
week's West Palm Beach jurors took to exonerate William
Kennedy Smith.  For the past decade, Garrison (who appears in
JFK as Chief Justice Earl Warren) has been part of America's
conspiracy industry -- saint to some, buffoon to others.

In Stone's mind, and in Costner's presence, the Garrison of
JFK is a hero: pure and simple. Upon learning that Lee Harvey
Oswald (Gary Oldman) had spent part of the summer in New
Orleans, Garrison questions people who may have known the
accused assailant: a ditsy homosexual named David Ferrie (Joe
Pesci), a hooker named Willie O'Keefe (Kevin Bacon), a
hipster lawyer (John Candy), an alcoholic private eye (Jack
Lemmon) -- a lower-depths cast whose connections seem to hint
at a dark secret.  Perhaps even a conspiracy?  Who dares call
it treason?

The D.A. does.  A dogged sleuth for the truth, Garrison gets
tips from "X," a disaffected military man (Donald
Sutherland), help from his staff (Michael Rooker, Jay O.
Sanders, Laurie Metcalf) and static from his wife (Sissy
Spacek).  By the time he has brought charges against the
elegant debauchee Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), the movie's
Garrison is convinced of the breadth and enormity of this
"secret murder at the heart of the American dream."

So, you want to know, who killed the President and connived
in the cover-up?  Everybody!  High officials in the CIA, the
FBI, the Dallas constabulary, all three armed services, Big
Business and the White House.  Everybody done it -- everybody
but Lee Harvey Oswald.  Oh, Oswald was probably a double
agent during his "defection" to the U.S.S.R., where he may
have provided information that helped the Soviets gun down
Francis Gary Powers' spy plane.  He may also have been in
cahoots with anti-Castro Cubans.  But he didn't shoot J.F.K.;
he didn't even shoot Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit.  The
one man charged with the Kennedy assassination was precisely
what he said he was: "a patsy."

Believe who will.  Scoff who chooses.  But save your outrage
for matters of greater moment than even a major motion
picture.  It's a tribute to Stone's contentious showmanship
that folks are het up about JFK, though it is neither the
first nor the last movie assault on the Warren Commission
Report.  The 1973 film Executive Action hypothesized that
leaders of the military-industrial complex conspired to kill
J.F.K. A scheme even more toxic percolated through the 1979
movie Winter Kills, based on Richard Condon's novel: that a
President very like Jack Kennedy could be assassinated by his
own father.  In February comes Ruby, from a Stephen Davis
play about the man who really did shoot Oswald.  And in
April, Libra, based on Don DeLillo's fantasia about Oswald,
his mother and the CIA, begins filming under John Malkovich's
direction.  Earlier this year, Libra's producers claimed that
Stone had used his clout to torpedo their production, a
charge Stone heatedly denies.

Stone should have shown more confidence in his own film.
Whatever one's suspicions about its use or abuse of the
evidence, JFK is a knockout.  Part history book, part comic
book, the movie rushes toward judgment for three breathless
hours, lassoing facts and factoids by the thousands, then
bundling them together into an incendiary device that would
frag any viewer's complacency. Stone's picture is, in both
meanings of the word, sensational: it's tip-top tabloid
journalism.  In its bravura and breadth, JFK is seditiously
enthralling; in its craft, wondrously complex.

Stone assembles and presents his material like a brilliant,
eccentric professor, dazzling you with free-form insights
even as he's poking you -- oops! -- in the eye with his
pointer.  He uses a canny mix of documentary footage
(including the Zapruder film) and re-enactments in 8-mm,
16-mm and 35-mm black-and-white and color to buttress, refute
or footnote testimony. "We didn't worry about everything not
fitting," says co-film editor Joe Hutshing. "The idea was to
create a tapestry, with various textures, grain sizes and
colors."

The film also employs clever, subtle sound effects.  When,
during the first interrogation of Clay Shaw, Garrison springs
Willie O'Keefe's name, we hear a dingdong!  In story terms,
it is a doorbell that cues the prostitute's appearance at
Shaw's front door (with a subtextual aural gag: the prancing
stud as Avon lady).  But it also alerts the viewer that,
after much digging, Garrison has come close to pay dirt. "The
sound has a subliminal effect," Hutshing says. "It's like
perfume -- it brings you back to that period."

In his earlier films, Stone could go bats, with prowling
cameras and screaming actors; but JFK is, for all its
bravura, compact and controlled.  Perhaps no Hollywood
director has made a film with so many speaking parts or data;
JFK is a crash briefing with great visual aids.  If David
Ferrie mentions a thunderstorm, Stone will lock it in your
mind with a quick image of lightning splitting the Texas sky.
Throughout, Stone juggles fact and supposition with such
dervish dexterity that even when he drops a ball, he never
loses his intense poise.

As storyteller, Stone is catering a buffet banquet of
conspiracy theories; you can gorge on them or just graze.  He
tells his audience what every entertainer says: entertain
this notion. Suspend disbelief.  Let's pretend.  What if?
Superficially, movies are a persuasive medium because they
exist in the present tense, not the conditional.  Each
picture is happening before our eyes; each Stone film fantasy
is, for the moment it is on the screen, the moviegoer's
reality.

But because films are fictions -- because even a naive viewer
knows Kevin Costner is an actor playing a moviemaker's
interpretation of a man named Jim Garrison -- the events they
portray need not be factual, or even probable; they must only
be plausible.  Through his art and passion, Stone makes JFK
plausible, and turns his thesis of a coup d'etat into fodder
for renewed debate.  The movie recognizes that history is not
only what we are told to believe; often it is gossip that
becomes gospel.

Does Stone see himself as a political director? "Not at all,"
he says. "I am trying to be a dramatist." And a dramatist
looks for a pattern.  Coincidences, random motives and the
privately festering grudges of a lone nut may be the small
sad facts behind the Kennedy assassination, but they satisfy
no one's demands -- least of all Stone's -- for the coherence
of myth.  The director needs a big-picture view to make his
big picture work.  And a hero like the movie's Garrison needs
a martyr like the movie's Kennedy.  The President must be
restored to Camelot; the philanderer of revisionist history
must be revised again, shown in home movies as a loving
husband, a doting dad. More important, he must be a crusader
who not only is determined to achieve his noble aims but also
is aware of mortal danger from his enemies.  If he was killed
by Oswald alone, then Kennedy was no martyr -- just the
victim of really rotten luck.

Stone argues that Kennedy was so progressive, so "soft on
communism" (and on Castro) and so popular that the right-wing
establishment was driven to kill him.  But this is a
romantic, perhaps fantasy, J.F.K.; he can as easily be seen
as a cold warrior with star quality.  He believed in the
domino theory of communism storming across Asia; he exercised
superpower machismo by eyeballing the Soviet Union over its
Cuban missiles until Khrushchev blinked.  He took flak from
liberals for appointing segregationist Southerners as judges
in federal courts.  Martin Luther King Jr., not Kennedy, was
the moral leader of the civil rights movement -- rights
confirmed only in Lyndon Johnson's tenure.

Stone's Garrison is semifictional as well, and open to
charges of distortion.  As played with understated power by
Costner, in his specs and rumpled jacket, Garrison is the
ordinary decent man whose search for truth makes him
extraordinary in a time of national fear and cowardice.
Borrowing the quest plot from Hamlet (or Star Wars), JFK
sends its hero out to avenge the murder of his spiritual
father, Jack Kennedy. "This is not a biography of Jim
Garrison," Costner says. "He was just the flagpole Oliver
tied the events around.  Was he right?  I'm not sure.  I
tried to play him without judging him.  That's somebody
else's job.  My job was to validate him as a character.  It's
up to the moviegoer to decide whether what he says is valid."

What wasn't valid, some supporters of conspiracy scenarios
charge, was the real Garrison's tactics.  In mythologizing
the D.A., JFK ignores allegations that he bullied witnesses
and suppressed a polygraph test.  These moral zits would
deface the hero's image -- and Stone's too, since he likely
sees himself as a modern movie Garrison, a brave man vilified
for unearthing the sordid, cleansing truth.  If Stone wants
to raise the Garrison flagpole and sit on it, waving
elaborate theories as if they were the Stars and Stripes,
fine.  But he should make his method clear to the audience.
JFK needs to carry the warning: This is a drama based on fact
and conjecture.

Under its breath, the movie says as much.  It prefixes some
scenes with a "For all we know, it could have been . . ." or
a "Let's just for a moment speculate, shall we?" Stone
embraces contradictions, or maybe he just trucks over them.
What Garrison tells his staff, Stone tells his viewers: "Now
we're through the looking glass here, people.  White is
black, and black is white." But the film's true epigraph
might be the counsel that "X" gives Garrison: "Don't take my
word.  Do your own work -- your own thinkin'."

"Nobody is claiming that the movie is the truth," says Sklar,
the editor of Garrison's book, On the Trail of the Assassins.
"But Oliver wanted to find out as much as he could about the
assassination and get close to the full truth, which he, like
many people, thinks has never been told."

Stone hired Sklar to work on the script, which was also based
on Jim Marrs' study, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy.
He boiled Sklar's 550-page first draft down to 160 pages and
interpolated extensive flashbacks, in the style of Rashomon
and Z. By April 1991, when filming began, Stone, Sklar and
co-producer A. Kitman Ho had interviewed more than 200
people.

The actors became detectives too. "It's like being a
journalist," Oldman said of his research into Oswald's
character. "We all became assassination buffs.  Marina
[Oswald's Russian-born widow] had a tape that she let me see.
It had a section leading up to the line, `I'm just a patsy.'
Oliver saw it, and he said, `Let's restage that scene.' "
Spacek spent time with Garrison's ex-wife Liz. "The sense I
got from her," the actress says, "is of a woman living the
life she wanted to live until her husband's obsession came
through.  She was proud of Jim, but his obsession went so
far."

On location in Dealey Plaza, actors and crew filmed the
motorcade re-enactment with super-8 movie cameras. "The
idea," says co-film editor Pietro Scalia, "was to create a
point of view so that this section has an amateurish look."
After much wrangling, the JFK company secured use of the
Texas School Book Depository, from which shots were fired on
Nov.  22.  The sixth floor had become a museum, so the
moviemakers used the seventh floor there and, for appropriate
perspective of the motorcade, the sixth floor of an adjacent
building.  Stone also filmed at the Dallas police
headquarters, where Jack Ruby killed Oswald. "The police were
very cooperative," says production designer Victor Kempster.
"They let us strip out computers in the offices and put in
1960s furniture.  That included changing doorways to fit the
film footage."

The crucial historical footage was the Zapruder film, for a
copy of which Stone paid $40,000. "It's the most important
visual record we have of the assassination," says Sklar. "To
make a movie without it is to miss a lot." Over and over, at
the climax of JFK, Garrison plays the fatal shot -- tragedy
as therapy -- to help solve the mystery and restore the
fearful impact of the day that yanked a nation out of its
cocoon of innocence.  For all its cynicism, or even paranoia,
about official venality, the film is a call for a kind of
informed innocence.  Stone says: Open your eyes wide, like a
child's.  Look around.  See what fits.  And Costner's
summation is right out of an old Frank Capra movie in its
declaration of principle in the face of murderous odds.  Lost
causes, as Capra's Mr. Smith said, are the only causes worth
fighting for.

To Stone's old enemies, JFK may be another volatile brew of
megalomania and macho sentiment. To his new critics, the film
may seem deliriously irresponsible, madly muttering like a
street raver.  But to readers of myriad espionage novels and
political-science fictions, in which the CIA or some other
gentlemen's cabal is always the villain, the movie's thesis
will be a familiar web spinning of high-level malevolence.
JFK is Ludlum or Le Carre, but for real.

Or -- crucial distinction -- for reel.  Memorize this mantra,
conspiracy buffs and guardians of public respectability: JFK
is only a movie.  And, on its own pugnacious terms -- the
only terms Oliver Stone would ever accept -- a terrific one.

How Many Shots Were Fired, and from Where?

THE MOVIE:

Stone's theory is that there were six shots, fired by three
teams of gunmen located in the Texas School Book Depository,
behind a nearby grassy knoll and in front of the limo.  Even
if Oswald was involved, the shooting took less than six
seconds, not long enough for him to have shot more than
twice.

THE EVIDENCE:

Most witnesses testified that there were only three shots.
Others said they heard four, at least one of which came from
the grassy knoll.  A House panel in 1979 analyzed a
motorcycle-radio tape and concluded that a fourth shot did
come from the knoll, but a subsequent study disputed this.
The Warren Commission said the Zapruder film could be
interpreted to mean the shooting took almost eight seconds,
giving Oswald ample time to fire three shots.

Could One Bullet Have Hit Both Kennedy and Connally?

THE MOVIE:

Garrison ridicules the Warren Commission's "magic-bullet"
hypothesis by showing the impossible zigzag trajectory it
would have had to take and by noting that the bullet in
question was found in almost pristine condition.  If he was
right, there must have been more than three shots.

THE EVIDENCE:

The magic-bullet theory is one of the weakest parts of the
Warren Commission's case; tests on animal and human cadavers
were never able to show it was plausible. But subsequent
studies by a skeptical House panel and by a Nova TV
documentary indicate that Kennedy and Connally could have
been positioned in such a way as to make it theoretically
possible. Neutron- activation tests indicate that the
fragments in Connally's wrist did come from the bullet in
question.

Where Did the Fatal Shot Come From?

THE MOVIE:

As shown in the Zapruder film, Kennedy's head lurched back
when hit, suggesting that the bullet came from the front and
not from the book depository.

THE EVIDENCE:

Kennedy's head does seem to snap back.  Defenders of the
Warren Commission argue that this does not prove the bullet
came from the front; they say the autopsy report and photos
make it clear the bullet entered from the rear.  The bullet
that hit Kennedy's head was found in the limousine, and tests
indicated that it came from Oswald's rifle.  Moreover, frame
313 of the Zapruder film clearly shows brain matter spraying
forward.

Did Oswald Know Ruby, Shaw and Ferrie?

THE MOVIE:

Shaw, Ferrie and Oswald are shown in New Orleans together,
and Oswald and Ferrie are shown with Ruby at his Dallas
nightclub.

THE EVIDENCE:

Over the years, some witnesses have come forward to say they
saw the alleged conspirators together at parties and at a
rally in rural Louisiana.  This was Garrison's key contention
in his 1969 trial of Shaw, but the jury rejected it.  Even
many conspiracy theorists doubt the credibility of the
witnesses.

Was the Autopsy Rigged?

THE MOVIE:

Kennedy is moved to Bethesda Naval Hospital near Washington
over objections of a Dallas official, and the autopsy is
supervised by top military commanders intent on covering up
the evidence.  The notes are then burned, and the President's
brain disappears.

THE EVIDENCE:

Indeed, Kennedy's body was ordered moved to Bethesda Naval
Hospital, some autopsy notes were destroyed, and the
whereabouts of the brain is unknown.  The autopsy photos
taken at Bethesda indicate a shot from the rear, but they
vary from the recollection of some doctors in Dallas.  There
have been lingering allegations -- but no hard evidence --
that someone tampered with the wounds on Kennedy's body.

Was It a Military Plot to Keep the U.S. in Vietnam?

THE MOVIE:

A man identified as "X" tells Garrison that Kennedy was the
victim of CIA and military officers who objected to his
secret plans to withdraw from Vietnam and to scuttle plots
against Fidel Castro.  The movie implies that the masterminds
were Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy fired as CIA director;
General Charles Cabell, who was deputy CIA director and the
brother of the mayor of Dallas; and a mystery man called
"General Y."

THE EVIDENCE:

"X" is based on a former Air Force colonel named Fletcher
Prouty, who was a director of special operations at the
Pentagon in the early 1960s and is now a prominent conspiracy
theorist. "General Y" is based on General Edward Lansdale, a
celebrated CIA officer who ran the covert "Operation
Mongoose" program to overthrow Castro and later served in
Vietnam.

Kennedy confided to certain antiwar Senators that he planned
to withdraw from Vietnam if re-elected; but publicly he
proclaimed his opposition to withdrawal.  In October 1963 he
signed a National Security Action Memo -- NSAM 263 -- that
ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 of the 16,000 or so U.S.
military "advisers."

After the assassination, Lyndon Johnson let the 1,000-man
withdrawal proceed, but it was diluted so that it involved
mainly individuals due for rotation rather than entire combat
units.  A few days after taking office he signed a new action
memo -- NSAM 273 -- that was tougher than a version Kennedy
had been considering; it permitted more extensive covert
military actions against North Vietnam.  No one has come
forward, however, with any direct knowledge of a military or
CIA conspiracy.

CAPTION: CONSPIRACY VICTIM?

CAPTION: Stone meticulously re-created Kennedy's fatal
motorcade in Dallas, even cutting trees so they matched the
scene on Nov.  22, 1963

CAPTION: The famous home movie taken by dress manufacturer
Abraham Zapruder shows Kennedy being hit in the throat

CAPTION: Costner as Garrison making his case in court, with a
model of Dealey Plaza

CAPTION: The "magic bullet"

CAPTION: Above, JFK's Oswald, Ferrie and Ruby; the real
Oswald, Ferrie, Ruby and Shaw

CAPTION: See above.

CAPTION: See above.

CAPTION: See above.

CAPTION: See above.

CAPTION: Sutherland as "X"; the real-life Prouty (the model
for "X") and Lansdale

CAPTION: See above.

CAPTION: See above.

Title:       J.F.K. and "JFK." (historical accuracy of Oliver
             Stone's motion picture) (Beat the Devil)
             (Column)

Authors:     Cockburn, Alexander
Citation:    The Nation, Jan 6, 1992 v254 n1 p6(2)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Presidents_Assassination
             JFK (Motion picture)_Criticism, interpretation,
               etc.

People:      Stone, Oliver_Criticism, interpretation, etc.;
             Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A11665944

=============================================================

Abstract: The film "JFK" contends that Pres Kennedy's
          assassination was a right-wing conspiracy to stop
          him from withdrawing the US from Vietnam. Kennedy
          actually oversaw a massive military build-up,
          increased the US presence in Vietnam, and approved
          the destabilization of foreign governments.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1992

J.F.K. and JFK

Whether J.F.K. was killed by a lone assassin or by a
conspiracy has as much to do with the subsequent contours of
American politics as if he had tripped over one of Caroline's
dolls and broken his neck in the White House nursery.

Of course many people think otherwise, reckoning that once it
can be demonstrated that the Warren Commission was wrong and
Oswald was not the lone killer, then we face the reality of a
rightist conspiracy engineered to change the course of
history. (The idea of Oswald as a leftist conspiracy of one
or more has perhaps fortunately never had the popularity one
might have expected.) This is the view taken by Oliver Stone,
who has stated in interviews, such as one in Spin, that
"Kennedy was really moving to end the cold war and sign a
nuclear treaty with the Soviets; he would not have gone to
war in Southeast Asia. He was starting a backdoor negotiation
with Castro." Instead of which good things, there was "the
first coup d'etat in America."

In JFK, Stone leaves no doubt about the coup's sponsors. A
sequence in grainy black-and-white, presumably designed for
extra verite, shows L.B.J. planning the assassination with
the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is a $40 million equivalent
of MacBird, though Stone's model is another Shakespeare play.

The core of this vision of history is put by Kevin Costner in
his role as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison:

We have all become Hamlets in our country, children of a
slain

father-leader whose killers still possess the throne. The
ghost

of John Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder at the

heart of the American dream. He forces on us the appalling

question: Of what is our Constitution made? What is our

citizenship - and more, our lives - worth? What is the
future,

where a President can be assassinated under conspicuously

suspicious circumstances, while the machinery of legal

action scarcely trembles? How many political murders
disguised

as heart attacks, cancer, suicides, airplane and car

crashes, drug overdoses, will occur before they are exposed
for

what they are?

Stone wrote those words himself (and at one point even
planned to have the ghost of J.F.K. appear to Garrison as he
stood in his kitchen making a chicken sandwich while watching
news of Bobby Kennedy's assassination). It's an important
passage, for in its truly fascist yearning for the
"father-leader" taken from the children-people by conspiracy,
it accurately catches the crippling nuttiness of what passes
amid some sectors of the left (admittedly a pretty nebulous
concept these days) as mature analysis and propaganda: that
virtue in government died in Dallas, and that a "secret
agenda" has perverted the national destiny.

With this demented optic, left ultimately joins hands with
right, as happened during the Gulf War when the para-Birchist
Craig Hulet won an enthusiastic following amid radical
circles for his conspiratorial account of the Bush regime's
policy even though anyone with half a brain could see after
about thirty seconds exactly where he was coming from. Out
the window goes any sensible analysis of institutions,
economic trends and pressures, continuities in corporate and
class interest and all the other elements constituting the
open secrets and agendas of American capitalism.

Title:       Taking a darker view. (JFK assassination)

Authors:     Rosenbaum, Ron
Citation:    Time, Jan 13, 1992 v139 n2 p54(3)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Assassination_Research

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A11725103

=============================================================

Abstract: The film 'JFK' has revived interest in the
          assassination of John F. Kennedy, and with it the
          entire history of conspiracy theories that have
          been raised to explain the event. Almost 75% of
          Americans polled believe JFK was killed as part of
          a conspiracy.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1992

Three weeks after its release, Oliver Stone's film JFK
continues to stir passions and debate, and to prompt calls
for the release of secret government files on the Kennedy
assassination.  Last week the controversy drew a response
from President Bush, who said while traveling in Australia
that although he had not seen the movie, he had no reason to
doubt the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald
acted alone in shooting Kennedy.  While no new evidence has
emerged, the film has focused attention on the band of mostly
self-appointed experts who zealously pursue theories of a
wider plot.  This subculture is explored here by Ron
Rosenbaum, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and the
author of Travels with Doctor Death, who has written
extensively on conspiracy theories.

Some years ago, during a telephone interview, I finally
succeeded in badgering Jim Garrison into naming the Name.
For years Garrison had been telling people he had the whole
case cold: he knew who gave the orders, who fired the shots
and from where.  Still, though he had talked a lot about the
Big Guys behind the plot -- intelligence agencies, the
military-industrial complex and the like -- he had never
publicly named the name of the man he believed fired the
fatal head shot from the grassy knoll.

I won't tell you that name, because Garrison didn't give me
any evidence for singling out this person for historic
infamy.  On another day, I felt, he might have picked another
name out of the hat.

Still, for one guilty moment I had the kind of thrill that
assassination buffs live for: I had the Name everyone else
was looking for and no one else had.  Of course, it wasn't an
entirely unknown name.  Garrison told me the person had been
questioned extensively by Warren Commission investigators,
and when I looked him up in the Warren Commission testimony,
I found he plays a kind of Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-level
role in the Warren Report, that of a peripheral figure in a
key place: he was a live-in manager and janitor at Jack
Ruby's sleazy strip joint, the Carousel Club.  There's no
doubt that the commission investigators were interested in
his story -- the transcript of his testimony runs more than
200 pages -- but mostly because he was a source who might
shed some light on the peculiarities of Jack Ruby's character
(investigators repeatedly pressed the Name on whether Ruby
had any sexual interest in his beloved dog Sheba).

Though reading the testimony didn't give me much intimation
of an assassination revelation, it was a revelation of
another kind.  In telling his life story, of how he wound up
in the Carousel Club in 1963, the Name was telling a story of
an American life -- of an America -- far different from the
one I'd known in my suburban hometown.

It was a story of a guy who made his living in the carnival
world; he worked as a barker with small-time freak-show acts
like "the two-headed baby" and "the snake girl," he told the
Warren Commission.  He bummed around looking for roustabout
jobs, met his first wife at a Salvation Army mission.  When
she left him in the summer of 1963, he hitchhiked all the way
from the West Coast to Dallas looking for her.  Picked up
some work at the Texas state fair in a carney sideshow called
"How Hollywood Makes Movies," which featured some of Jack
Ruby's strippers.  Made some connections and soon found
himself living in the back room of the Carousel Club in the
midst of Ruby's strange menage, which included strippers,
burlesque comics, stage hypnotists and, of course, the dog
Sheba.

I remember reading this testimony, mesmerized by my sudden
immersion in a carnival-sideshow underbelly of American life.
(The 26 volumes of Warren Commission testimony are like a
vast, inchoate Great American Novel in that respect.) I
didn't feel I was any closer to solving the Kennedy
assassination, but I did feel I had learned more about the
America that produced both Kennedy and his assassin than was
conveyed by the bland, complacent sitcom image of the nation
and its institutions that prevailed in November 1963.

And that, I believe, is the real legacy of nearly three
decades of revisionist Kennedy-assassination investigation.
We may not ever know with certainty the Name or the Names.
But we do have a much darker, more complex, less innocent
vision of America, produced by the murk that has been churned
up by the dissidents.

Consider the FBI.  In 1963 few dissented from the view that
its director, J. Edgar Hoover, was a peerless, incorruptible
leader, a gangbuster nonpareil.  He said so himself.  Now, we
may not want to agree with the conclusion of the latest
FBI-centered conspiracy-theory book Act of Treason: The Role
of J. Edgar Hoover in the Assassination of President Kennedy.
The author, Texas attorney Mark North, accuses Hoover of
deliberately withholding knowledge of a Mafia assassination
plot against J.F.K. because he hated the Kennedy brothers and
had enough dirt on L.B.J. to control him.  But North's
accumulation of documentary evidence of the ugly blackmail
intrigues Hoover was weaving in the cellars of Camelot is
perhaps even more damning than the allegations of treason.

Much of this has been reported earlier: the way Hoover
pressured the Kennedys into letting him bug the bedrooms of
Martin Luther King Jr.; how he subtly blackmailed the Camelot
kids over their bedroom sports, including J.F.K.'s romps with
the girlfriend of godfather Sam Giancana and (probably) with
Marilyn Monroe.  We know that while Hoover was passing around
tapes of creaking bedsprings, he was letting the Mob grow
unchecked and was going easy on deep sewers of Washington
corruption like the Bobby Baker case to protect patrons like
L.B.J.

Or consider the CIA.  To those who knew of it at all in 1963,
it was still living off the glamour of its wartime OSS
(Office of Strategic Services) legend -- the dashing
blue-blooded oh-so-social spies, American James Bonds.  Even
the black eye of the Bay of Pigs fiasco could be attributed
to Kennedy's failure of nerve rather than to the Harvard and
Yale ole boys who drew up the plans.  From almost the very
beginning, the CIA has been a focus of Kennedy-assassination
conspiracy theories (bitterness by some agents over Kennedy's
Bay of Pigs "betrayal" was an obvious motive).  This year the
first and most relentless conspiracy theorist of them all,
Mark Lane, has come out with a book, Plausible Denial, which
targets high-level CIA figures as the plotters behind the
assassination.  Lane presents what he calls new and
conclusive evidence that the CIA was setting up Oswald in the
months before the assassination by having an Oswald
impersonator meet with Soviet and Cuban agents in Mexico
City, the better to frame him as a Commie assassin.

Again, even if we don't buy Lane's conclusion about CIA
complicity in the Kennedy assassination, 20 years of
investigations have shown that the CIA was no stranger to
complicity in assassinations.  We know how the best and
brightest blue bloods bonded with the bloodiest and dirtiest
Mafia hit men in plots to kill Castro.  We know the
freak-show side of the agency that used damagng mind-control
drugs on unsuspecting citizens; we know that the agency's own
top counterspy, James Angleton, paralyzed the place with his
paranoid suspicions that KGB moles and false defectors had
penetrated the CIA in order to, among other things, conceal
the Soviets' true role in the J.F.K. assassination.  Even
David Belin, the former Warren Commission staff member who is
fighting what he calls a "David and Goliath battle" to defend
the Warren Commission's lone-gunman conclusion, declares in
his book Final Disclosure that the CIA blatantly deceived his
beloved Warren Commission -- specifically that it
"deliberately withheld evidence" of the CIA-Mafia plots
against Castro.

Now consider the Kennedys themselves.  Inevitably the darker,
carnivalesque vision of America that has emerged in the wake
of post-assassination investigations has not exempted them.
Curiously, otherwise skeptical assassination buffs are among
the last misty-eyed believers in Camelot.  They still hold to
the primal scenario sketched in Oliver Stone's JFK: a
Galahad-like John Kennedy gallantly battling the sinister
right-wing military-industrial complex to bring the troops
home, ban the Bomb and ensure racial equality on the home
front -- a Kennedy killed because he was just too good to
live.

You can hear other echoes of this naive vision in such
conspiracy-theory compendiums as Jim Marrs' Crossfire: The
Plot That Killed Kennedy, which was a key source for Stone.
Marrs sums up his account of the Bad Guys in the plot,
laboring to leave no one out: "Who done it? . . .  Powerful
men in the leadership of the U.S. military, banking,
government, intelligence and organized-crime circles ordered
their faithful agents to manipulate Mafia-Cuban-agency pawns
to kill the chief."

But what's more interesting is Marrs' arcadian vision of what
America might be like today if J.F.K. had lived: "No divisive
Vietnam war . . . [no] Watergate, no other political
assassinations, or the Iran-contra-Pentagon-CIA attempt at a
secret government.  Detente with communist Russia and China .
. . [would have saved defense dollars] that could have been
put to use caring for the needy and cleaning up the
environment . . . no organized-crime control over drugs,
gambling . . . even toxic waste . . ." One feels Marrs
believes that if Kennedy had lived the toxic waste just
wouldn't have been as toxic anyway, because of all the fine,
purifying Camelot vibes in the air.

By now, of course, an accumulation of sordid revelations has
made J.F.K.'s Washington seem less like Arthur's Camelot than
Capone's Chicago.  J.F.K. himself, we know, was almost
literally in bed with the Chicago Mob, sleeping with the
godfather's mistress, for God's sake; his minions used
Chicago mobsters as hit men against a rival head of state.
He was enmeshed in sordid blackmail intrigues with Hoover; he
was implicated in bugging King's bedrooms.  Far from a noble
peacemaker, he was a hawkish enthusiast for dirty tricks and
covert ops, so Machiavellian that -- according to Michael
Beschloss's new book, The Crisis Years -- he may even have
given his blessing to Khrushchev's building of the Berlin
Wall.  In retrospect, J.F.K. resembles Marrs' Galahad less
than a gang leader like The Godfather's Michael Corleone --
the well-meaning son of a shadowy godfather (Joe Kennedy,
with his bootlegging connections to the Mob), who can't
escape his father's legacy or his family's cutthroat
character.

In this respect the assassination theorists who seem most
prescient, or at least realistic, are the odd couple of
Malcolm X and L.B.J. It was Malcolm who provoked a storm of
obloquy in the aftermath of the Dallas shooting when he said
J.F.K.'s killing was "a case of the chickens coming home to
roost." And it was L.B.J. who 10 years later gave a kind of
gritty geopolitical substance to Malcolm's metaphor when he
told an ex-aide that J.F.K. was "running a damned Murder
Incorporated in the Caribbean" -- all those CIA assassination
plots -- and that he believed one of these plots must have
backfired, or doubled back on Kennedy, in Dealey Plaza.

Perhaps this gets a bit too close to blame-the-victim.  But
could it be that the cumulative blackening of the sepulchers
of Camelot is responsible for one of the most curious new
trends in conspiracy-theory history -- the increasing number
of people coming forward not merely to claim they know who
did it but to confess they did it?

One of the first to try this gambit was Charles V. Harrelson,
the Texas hit man who happens to be the father of Cheers star
Woody Harrelson.  Cornered by cops seeking to arrest him for
assassinating a federal judge in Texas, Harrelson, according
to Marrs, told lawmen that he was the guy who killed Kennedy.
By the time he backed off the story, assassination buffs had
already convinced themselves that they had photographic
evidence of Harrelson's presence in Dealey Plaza that day.
They had "positively" identified him as one of the mysterious
"tramps" arrested near the crime scene after the
assassination -- conveniently forgetting they had previously
"proved" that two of the tramps were actually Watergate
burglars E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis.

Next to confess was Robert Easterling, a Mississippi ex-con
who told journalist Henry Hurt in 1985 that he killed Kennedy
on behalf of Fidel Castro.  And then, in 1989, there was the
son of a Dallas policeman who pushed his own (now dead)
father forward as the grassy-knoll assassin, introducing some
curious confessional documentation he claimed to have found
in an attic. (The credibility problem of assassination buffs
has not been enhanced by the double standard with which they
seem to accept indiscriminately every self-proclaimed
assassin or grassy-knoll eyewitness who comes forward, but
tear to shreds any evidence or testimony that might support
the lone-gunman theory.)

Recently, after seeing JFK, I found myself curious about what
had become of the man Jim Garrison once named as the hit man.
I consulted some of the assassination buffs still speaking to
me (though an agnostic on whether there was a conspiracy, I
had written skeptically about the methodology of some of
them), and one told me of a buff in Canada who made a
specialty of tracking down lesser known figures in the case
who might otherwise disappear into the mists of history.

Yes, the Canadian researcher told me, he had traced the still
wandering whereabouts of the Name.  And he wasn't the only
one interested, he said.  A former Warren Commission attorney
had told him he still couldn't figure out why the Name made
such a hasty exit from Dallas: 36 hours after the
assassination, he left town and hitchhiked 2,000 miles north
to Michigan.  Another buff had theorized that the Warren
Commission was interested in the Name because he bore an
eerie physical resemblance to Oswald -- which might have been
an innocent explanation for some of the "Oswald" sightings in
Ruby's Carousel Club.  Other buffs wondered if he might not
be one of the mysterious "Oswald impersonators" who was
setting up the real, innocent Oswald to be the assassination
patsy.

Declining to be led into this labyrinth of suspicion, I
nonetheless asked the Canadian buff what had become of the
Name's life after he fled Dallas.  It seems he couldn't
really escape -- Nov.  22 continued to haunt him.  The FBI
followed him to Michigan and questioned him repeatedly; he
had to go back to Dallas for Ruby's trial; he never found the
wife he'd lost.  And then in the early '80s, just when his
life seemed to have settled down, renewed interest in the
J.F.K. case made his name an object of speculation again: it
appeared in a book on the organized-crime connections to Ruby
and the assassination.  His new wife read the book and began
to get a little paranoid.  She wondered about the serious car
accident they had had: Was it really an accident?
Eventually, things began to go awry: his marriage broke up,
he lost his job.  Last thing the Canadian buff heard, the
Name was working as a night security guard in a mill,
"boarding with some people," without a traceable phone number
of his own.

Looking back, it doesn't seem that much of a mystery why the
poor guy fled Dallas so abruptly. His life took a wrong turn
down there and never recovered.  So did ours.  We're all
still fleeing Dallas, but it's too late to escape.

CAPTION: Stone's movie re-creation of the assassination: a
legacy of three decades of revisionism

CAPTION: See above.

CAPTION: Ruby shooting Oswald in 1963: a sleazy,
carnival-sideshow vision of the nation's leaders

Title:       A ticking bomb at the movies. (Oliver Stone's
             motion picture 'JFK') (An American View)
             (Column)

Authors:     Bruning, Fred
Citation:    Maclean's, Jan 13, 1992 v105 n2 p11(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Assassination_Portrayals, depictions, etc.
             JFK (Motion picture)_Social aspects

People:      Stone, Oliver_Criticism, interpretation, etc.;
             Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A11796053

=============================================================

Abstract: Oliver Stone's motion picture 'JFK' adds nothing
          useful to the ongoing debate of the assassination
          of John F. Kennedy. The movie suggests the craziest
          conspiracy theory yet, since the assassination
          itself.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Maclean Hunter Ltd. (Canada) 1992

Heading for the parking lot after a showing of JFK, a
moviegoer in suburban New York City was hailed by someone
awaiting the next performance.

"How was it?" asked the ticket holder, full of anticipation.

"Perfect," stated the first fellow without pausing to
elaborate.

It was a moment that would have cheered Oliver Stone, the
rambunctious director who, amid stout pronouncements
regarding his own bravado and the faintheartedness of most
everyone else in government and mass media, dropped JFK like
a ticking bomb in the pocket of the American public.  "I just
want to get the people to smell a rat," Stone told Robert
Scheer of the Los Angeles Times.  "I want people to be moved
by it and have their consciousness shifted."

Despite the exuberance of cinema fans who may oncur that JFK
was "perfect," and notwithstanding Stone's claims for the
peerless quality of his insights, the film is no more
valuable to the continuing debate on the assassination of
John F. Kennedy tha, say, the latest episode of Columbo.
Using Stone's movie as a guide to understanding the Kennedy
murder is like enduring a Guns n' Roses video with the intent
of better appreciating Mozart.  Not a chance.

Perfect?

As a movie, JFK has all the right stuff.  The story is
gripping--we are discussing a plot to murder a president of
the United States, after all--and production values are
superb.  Stone melds authentic newsreel footage with his own
staged material, so that many in the audience, particularly
younger people, will not easily make the requisite
distinctions.

He uses location with such skill that by the time the movie
is over, viewers may feel they have trudged many times up the
grassy knoll of Dallas, that they have driven in that fated
motorcade through Dealey Plaza--that, like the assassin, they
have squinted through sights from the sixth-floor window of
the Texas School Book Depository building.

And surely Stone is gifted when it comes to integrating a
particularly foreboding brand of background music--percussive
strains that seem linked to familiar dreams of melancholy and
madness.  Yes, indeed, something awful is transpiring here,
the music asserts, and if no one else in the country has
enough mettle to shout a warning, Oliver Stone will not
falter.  Don't dare slip out to the candy counter.  Soon you
are going to learn who really killed Jack Kennedy!

This approach might be acceptable if JFK weren't being
marketed as gospel--if Stone stopped insisting that Americans
accept perhaps the wackiest conspiracy theory advanced since
Kennedy was cut down on Nov. 22, 1963.  Stone has adopted,
and even embellished, a hypothesis advanced by former New
Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who argued, without
success, that Kennedy--having alienated conservative elements
at home and abroad--fell victim to an astonishing right-wing
cabal embracing the CIA, FBI, anti-Castro Cubans, the
Pentagon and elements of the Dallas police department.

The district attorney failed in the only courtroom test of
his theory when a jury acquitted businessman Clay Shaw, who
Garrison said played a crucial part in the murder.  "Most of
the time you marshal the facts, then deduce your theories,"
one of Garrison's former assistants, Charles Ward, told the
New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1983.  "But Garrison deduced a
theory, then marshalled his facts.  And if the facts didn't
fit, he'd say they had been altered by the CIA."

In New Orleans and beyond, many considered Garrison a
24-karat kook on the question of the Kennedy assassination
but, now, more than two decades later, Stone sells Garrison's
superheated scenario as though it were divinely inspired.  In
perhaps its most shoking aspect, Stone's movie even holds out
the possibility that lyndon Johnson, Kennedy's
vice-president, had a hand in snuffing the chief executive.
Johnson may have been crude, self-important and tragically
mistaken about Vietnam.  But an unindicted co-conspirator in
a plot to murder the president of the United States?  Please.

Not surprisingly, anyone resisting Stone's conclusions is apt
to be dismissed as a junior member of the same ugly
conspiracy that doomed Kennedy in the first place--a tactic
that Garrison, who also felt misused by the press, often
employed himself.  Stone complains that the film has made him
fair game for "a thousand and one vultures out there,"
including "a lot of these paid-off journalistic hacks working
on the East Coast."

Stone indeed has been roundly criticized by many reporters
for massaging the evidence, but, somehow, the director just
doesn't get it.  In his interview with the Los Angeles Times,
Stone argued that he merely was concocting a "counter-myth"
to the one peddled by the U.S. government.  The Warren
commission may have concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald killed
Kennedy, but Stone prefers a more exotic reading.  "Call me a
guerrilla historian," says Stone.

To say the least, Stone is not alone in suspecting the
assassination was never adequately investigated.  A
Washington Post poll in May showed that 56 per cent of those
responding thought Kennedy the victim of a conspiracy, while
only 19 per cent bought the lone-assassin theory.  Obviously,
there are troubling issues still unresolved and the American
people, at last, deserve to know precisely what happened on
that extraordinary day in Dallas.

Judging by his early work, Stone might have been the one to
bring such volatile subject matter to the screen.  He has
made brave and important movies.  Nourished by the director's
Vietnam combat experience.  Platoon is a film that should be
shown in every social studies class.  Salvador is a haunting
piece linking U.S. policy to chaos in Central America.  But,
with JFK, Stone lapses into pure agitprop.  The movie is
based more on fancy than fact, and will prompt many to ask
only the wrong questions about Kennedy's death.  Whatever he
intended this time, Stone did little more than inflict on
American audiences a "perfect" movie that wasn't nearly good
enough.

Fred Bruning is a writer with Newsday in New York.

Title:       JFK: the myth. (Oliver Stone's motion picture)
             (Editorial)

Authors:     Kopkind, Andrew
Citation:    The Nation, Jan 20, 1992 v254 n2 p40(2)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    JFK (Motion picture)_Criticism, interpretation,
               etc.

People:      Stone, Oliver_Criticism, interpretation, etc.;
             Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A11808875

=============================================================

Abstract: The vociferous reaction against Oliver Stone's
          movie "JFK" is rooted in the fact that the Kennedy
          assassination was a watershed event in recent
          American history that mythologized John Kennedy.
          Stone's film is propaganda, but his iconoclasm is
          to be commended.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1992

"He's hot, he's sexy-and he's dead." That memorable Rolling
Stone headline referred to Jim Morrison, but it might well
have been John F. Kennedy, the other subject of a major
Oliver Stone release. Both men were American icons of the
same generation, and in translating important aspects of
their respective iconographies to the screen Stone was
playing with fire. Though P.C. snobs may sneer at the fuss
made over a couple of long-dead white men, the one a drug
enhanced, sex-crazed, promising but unfulfilled rock star;
the other a drug-enhanced, sex-crazed, promising but
unfulfilled politician, nevertheless the cults around the
fallen idols are larger than life or death, fervently
followed and vigorously, indeed viciously, defended.

Stone got off relatively easy with The Doors, an often
rapturous movie that, unfortunately, not too many people went
to see. (He told me last summer that he is especially angry
at blacks, who apparently stayed away in droves for what
Stone said were "racist" reasons.) JFK is a different matter.
Even before it opened in mid-December it was a political
event of phenomenal proportions: the story of the season
between the Anita Hill-clarence Thomas hearings and the end
of the Soviet Union. Future conspiracy theorists will surely
note that Mario Cuomo defied all expectations and announced
his decision not to run for the presidency on the very day
that JFK opened nationwide !  Notwithstanding the particular
assassination theory Stone propounds, and his rather adoring
assessment of Kennedy's foreign policy, the furious arguments
and attacks engendered by the movie have very little to do
with the material of history but rather abound in the stuff
of myth. For virtually every American alive and conscious of
a social reality in November 1963, the assassination forms
the central political myth of the public world. The myth is
in the matrix of the national experience, etched by
television and consecrated by ritual, and no amount of
political science will demystify the memory of murder.

Those dogged researchers who have dared over the years to
deconstruct the myth have made hardly a dent in the national
consciousness. Most have been labeled assassination maniacs,
nuts and kooks, and their works have remained on the margins
of legitimacy (and some really are nuts). Others (like
myself, and more recently in these pages, my friend Alexander
Cockburn) who have tried to debunk the part of the myth that
insists that Kennedy was about to withdraw troops from
Vietnam, achieve detente with Khrushchev and bestow peace on
the world, have similarly made little headway with history.
When the Prince of Peace is martyred, no one wants to hear
that he was not a prince nor particularly pacific.

Stone neither deconstructs nor debunks. His method is to
substitute another myth-consistent, compelling and just a
little unconvincing-for the "official" one that seems to have
been a comfort for so long but is so shot full of holes by
now that it can barely float. Certainly he has every right to
do what he does. John Ford's December Seventh, recently
reremembered as the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor came
around, also mixed documentary footage with reconstructions
and simulations, inserted historical speculations as ironclad
fact and gave heroic (or villainous) dimensions to ordinary
people. It was a great film and brilliant propaganda, which
is to say, what movies ought to be.

But reasonable columnists like Tom Wicker (who was in Dallas
that day), cool commentators like Cokie Roberts (whose
father, Hale Boggs, was a member of the Warren Commission)
and what seems like the unanimous journalistic establishment
are ready to burn every print of JFK they could because of
the damage a countermyth, an alternative paradigm, is thought
to do to the national spirit and, I guess, the collective
will. Monolithic myths-the manifest decency of America, the
infallibility of the church, the existence of historical
truth-are more fascistic than any transient leader. In that
case, a little narrative pluralism can be truly subversive.
Now, it may be hard for some to admit that Oliver Stone, with
$40 million per film at his disposal and virtually unlimited
media access, can be a subversive force, but he has done a
great service by recasting the idols in the heart of the
temple.

ANDREW KOPKIND

Title:       The conspiracy that won't go away.
             (assassination of John F. Kennedy)

Authors:     Oglesby, Carl
Citation:    Playboy, Feb 1992 v39 n2 p74(10)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Presidents_Assassination
             Assassination_Investigations

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination;  Garrison,
             Jim_Investigations

Reference #: A11797549

=============================================================

Abstract: Jim Garrison, a former New Orleans district
          attorney, believed that a government conspiracy was
          behind Kennedy's assassination. He believes that
          Lee Harvey Oswald was set up, and that CIA agents
          were responsible for the assassination.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Playboy Enterprises Inc. 1992

WE ARE IN a screening room atop the Westin Hotel in New
Orleans.  It is July 1991 and Oliver Stone is in town filming
JFK, his latest assault on establishment sensibilities, a
movie with the premise that we do not yet know the truth
about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in
Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Stone has already filmed the Dallas scenes.  He has brought
his company to New Orleans because JFK is based on the work
of Jim Garrison, a young and aggressive district attorney at
the time of the J.F.K. murder.  The lights dim and an image
flickers to life on the screen.  The clapper board reads JFK,
SCENE 30.  We are in a cell in the Dallas County Jail.  It is
June 1964, seven months after Dealey Plaza.

The prisoner is Jack Ruby, a stocky, nervous middle-aged man
whom the whole world watched murder accused J.F.K. assassin
Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV two days after Oswald's arrest.
Facing Ruby across a table, erect and somber in a black suit,
sits Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the
reluctant chairman of the Report of the President's
Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

It is a tense moment.  Ruby has insisted on testifying even
though no one wants him to, least of all Warren himself.  "Do
you understand that I cannot tell the truth here in Dallas?"
Ruby says.  "That there are people here who do not want me to
tell the truth?"

But Warren says only, "Mr. Ruby, I really can't see why you
can't tell us now."

Ruby's desperation is palpable.  "If I am eliminated," he
says, "there won't be any way of knowing."  He waits for a
reaction, but Warren seems a genius at not getting on Ruby's
wave length.  He does not ask, "Knowing what?"

Finally, exasperated, Ruby blurts it out: "A whole new form
of government is going to take over our country,' he says,
"and I know I won't live to see you another time.  My life is
in danger here.  Do I sound screwy?"

And Warren's voice resonates in its most mournful basso, the
words lingered over, tasted, given all their weight: "Well, I
don't know what can be done, Mr. Ruby.  Because I don't know
what you anticipate we will encounter."  Now the camera turns
more closely on the heavy, solemn figure of Warren and, for a
moment, it almost is Warren, the right age, the right look of
stolid pride.

But the figure isn't Warren at all, of course.  It's Jim
Garrison.  Not Kevin Costner, who plays the part of Garrison
in the film, but Garrison himself, the real Garrison, all six
and a half feet of him.  No soul in all creation stands more
opposed to Warren on the question of what happened in Dallas
than does Garrison, the embattled naysayer of New Orleans,
who was one of the first to hold that J.F.K. was felled by
conspiracy , that the same conspiracy acted through Ruby to
kill Oswald and thus prevent a trial, and that the commission
to which Warren gave his name was the front line of the most
serious cover-up in American history.

"Warren must have spun madly in his grave," mused Garrison
the next afternoon as we talked about this scene.  "I can
only hope the afterlife has sharpened his taste for irony."

Yet Stone was not just indulging his own taste for irony in
casting Garrison in this role.  "Between adversaries," Stone
told me, "there can sometimes be great respect."  Had Stone
not seen in Garrison that respect for the adversary, his
casting move could easily have backfired.  Let Garrison's
portrayal of Warren seem the least bit vindictive and the
entire movie could come out looking like a cheap shot.

Garrison leaned forward with delight.  "I'll swear I never
said it," he remarked in his soft New Orleans drawl, "but I
think it was a minor stroke of genius for Oliver to offer me
this role.  The great thing about it is that the screenplay
uses Warren's words.  And the more I studied them, the more I
could see that Warren had developed such empathy with Ruby
that he couldn't control himself completely.  Although I've
never foreign Warren for what he did, he was a basically warm
human being.  You could tell he felt sorry for Ruby even as
he evaded him.  And in that final line, he told him more than
he intended to.  He confessed his own weakness."

His smile brightened.  "And I think I was just the actor to
bring this out.  If Warren could see it, I think he'd smile."

Garrison enactment of Warren seems a perfect summation of a
career that has been to an uncommon degree shaped by irony,
by a relationship with the mass media predicated on equal
parts of mutual need and rejection.  JFK is based on
Garrison's 1988 memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins.  This
in itself is satisfying to Garrison, now a retired Louisiana
appeals-court judge.  He finds it satisfying to see himself
portrayed by an actor as convincing and warm as Kevin Costner
in a movie directed with the artistry and drive of Oliver
Stone.

But the mere news that Stone was making this movie was enough
to reawaken the media furies that have bedeviled Garrison
since he first joined the great hunt for the J.F.K.
conspiracy in 1966.

As early as last May, when Stone had barely begun production,
Chicago Tribune columnist Jon Margolis angrily assured his
readers that JFK was going to be not just a bad movie but an
evil one, "morally repugnant" because it sympathetically
treated Garrison's "fantasies" that a conspiracy was
responsible for the J.F.K. assassination and that federal
agents were probably involved.  George Lardner of The
Washington Post entered the fray with two long diatribes in
which he grudgingly admitted that "a probable conspiracy took
place," while insisting that this was "not an acknowledgement
that Garrison's investigation was anything but a fraud."
Then came Time magazine to dismiss Garrison as somewhere
"near the far-out fringe of conspiracy theorists."

A man less confident of his vision may have been shaken, but
Garrison long since has become inured.  "Being attacked with
such vehemence from so many sides and for such a variety of
reasons, I admit, is not conclusive proof that one is right,"
he says with a smile and a shrug.  "But surely it goes a long
way."

The controversy that rages around Garrison is set against the
fact that he started out so all-American.  He was born in
1921 in Denison, Iowa, to a family of tall lawyers that soon
moved to New Orleans.  At the age of 19, in 1940, he joined
the U.S. Army and, in 1942, was commissioned as a lieutenant
in the field artillery.  He volunteered for flight training
and spent the war on the European front flying light
airplanes on low-level and often-dangerous spotter missions.
He saw combat in France and Germany and was present at the
liberation of Dachau.

He came back to New Orleans, earned his law degree at Tulane
and joined the FBI, which sent him to Seattle to check out
the loyalty of defense employees, a job he soon found
"greatly boring."  He left the FBI and returned to New
Orleans to go into private practice as a trial lawyer.  Then
he went to work in the district attorney's office.  He ran
for a judgeship in 1960 and lost, but then, in 1961,
quarreled publicly with Mayor Victor Schiro--whom he accused
of "laxity in law enforcement"--and District Attorney Richard
Dowling, whom he called "the great emancipator" because he
"lets everyone go free."

This was the first burst of controversy in his career and it
immediately propelled him to a higher orbit.  He campaigned
for D.A. in 1961, without the backing of the Democratic Party
and without a big war chest.  But he had the strong support
of both blacks and blue-collar whites, a unique coalition in
the South of the early Sixties.  "To my surprise and to the
astonishment of many others," he says, "I was elected."

He moved immediately to make good on his election promises.
"If this entitled raising the level of confrontation," he
recalls, "my attitude was, well, let the good times roll."
He clamped down on organized gambling and prostitution, made
Bourbon Street safe for tourists, challenged police
corruption and criticized eight criminal-court judges for
refusing to approve funds for his fight against racketeering.
The judges sued him for defamation of $1000; but he appealed,
arguing that elected judges were not exempt from public
criticism.  He won a reversal.

Jim Garrison was on the map.

So was Fidel Castro.

Castro overthrew Cuban dictator General Fulgencio Batista and
took power in 1959.  He announced a communist program.
Cubans opposed to his government began flocking to Miami and
New Orleans.  Many of them formed counterrevolutionary
organizations with such names as Alpha-66, the Cuban
Revolutionary Council, Free Cuba, the Cuban Expeditionary
Force and the Cuban Brigade.  All were sponsored by the CIA.

Their aim was to reverse Castro's revolution.  This was the
objective of their major military assault, Operation Zapata,
organized by the CIA and the U.S. military.  The world came
to know Operation Zapata better as the Bay of Pigs fiasco of
April 1961.  This attempted invasion failed to inspire the
mass uprising that was its major strategic premise.  The
Zapata guerrillas were pinned down on their beachheads
without a chance to declare a provisional government.
Instead of sending in U.S. military support, J.F.K. opted to
cut his losses, standing by as the invasion force was
captured and paying a humiliating ransom to rescue the
prisoners.  An angry self-pity soon gripped the anti-Castro
militants and their U.S. supporters.  They blamed Operation
Zapata's failure on Kennedy.  He had put them on the beach,
then fled.

Then J.F.K. betrayed them again, as they saw it, in October
1962, when a spy plane revealed Soviet missile bases under
construction in Cuba.  In the year and a half since the Bay
of Pigs, the CIA had helped the exiles stage a series of
commando raids against a variety of Cuban targets.  But in
the secret deal that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis with the
dismantling of the Soviet bases, J.F.K. promised that this
activity would end.

This arrangement deeply affected an ultra-right-wing
acquaintance of Garrison's named W. Guy Banister, a key
player in the anti-Castro games of New Orleans.  Banister
served in the office of Naval Intelligence during World War
Two and after the war joined the FBI, rising to head its
Chicago bureau.  He left the FBI to become deputy chief of
police in New Orleans, then resigned in 1957 to set up a
private detective agency.

In 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Banister
was involved in running a CIA training camp for anti-Castro
Cuban guerrillas on Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans.
Garrison had no idea at the time that Banister was involved
in this activity.  But he did know that Banister was not just
another gumshoe for hire.

Guy Banister Associates, Inc., hung out its shingle,
according to Garrison, "across the street from the building
that housed the local offices of the CIA and the FBI.  And
across from that building was the New Orleans headquarters of
Operation Mongoose."  Operation Mongoose was an array of
anti-Castro projects being run by the CIA, the Defense
Department and the State Department under the coordination of
Air Force Major General Edward G. Lansdale.  Its CIA
component, called Task Force W, was dedicated to the
assassination of Castro.  Its deepest secret was the fact
that the CIA had contracted out his murder to the Mafia.  Its
headquarters was the meeting place for Cuban exiles coming in
from Florida.  "They were sleeping in the hallways," says
Garrison.

Banister's key associate in these anti-Castro operations was
a peculiar man named David Ferrie.  Ferrie was an ace pilot,
a kitchen-sink scientist, an omnivorous reader in the occult,
a well-known denizen of the New Orleans gay scene, a militant
activist against Castro and a great hater of J.F.K.  His
on-the-job homosexual activities had cost him his pilot's job
at Eastern Airlines, but he had flown several clandestine
flights to Castro's Cuba and was part of the training staff
at the Lake Pontchartrain guerrilla camp.  A rare chronic
disease (alopecia praecox) having taken all his hair, he wore
a wig made out of mohair and drew on his eyebrows with a
grease pencil.  He worked out of Banister's office, but he
also served as a free-lance investigator for G. Wray Gill, a
lawyer who represented Carlos Marcello, the Mafia godfather
of New Orleans.  Ferrie reputedly flew Marcello back into the
United States after his deportaton by Robert Kennedy in 1961.
On the day of J.F.K.'s murder, Ferrie was with Marcello in a
New Orleans court as Marcello won a verdict against R.F.K.'s
effort to deport him again.

But far stranger still among Banister's associates in the
summer of 1963 was a young ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald.

At first look, Oswald seems to be a creature of
contradictions.  On closer examination, the contradictions
become complexities.

There was, on the one hand, the patriotic Oswald, a true-blue
if emotionally mixed-up American kid raised in and around New
Orleans, New York City and Fort Worth by his widowed (and
twice-divorced) mother with the help of aunt Lillian and
uncle "Dutz" Murret, a bookie in the Marcello gambling net.
As a teenager in New Orleans, Oswwald joined the local Civil
Air Patrol and there met David Ferrie, its commander, in
1955.  He tried to join the Marines but was rejected for
being underage.  He went home and memorized the Marine Corps
manual, and cam back to try again as soon as he reached 17 in
October 1956, this time succeeding.

Oswald served his three years ably, rated "every competent"
and "brighter than most" by his officers.  The Marines
cleared him for access to the performance characteristics of
the top-secret U-2.  They put him in a program of
Russian-language training and instruction in the basics of
Marxism-Leninism, as though he were being prepared for
intelligence work.  Indeed, a Navy intelligence operative
named Gerry Hemming had thought as far back as 1959 that
Oswald was "some type of agent."  The House Select Committee
on Assassinations noted that "the question of Oswald's
possible affiliation with military intelligence could not be
fully resolved."

On the other hand, there was Oswald the traitor.  With only
three months to go in the Marines, rather than await the
normal discharge process, he applied for a hardship discharge
for no good reason (citing a minor and already-healed injury
to his mother's foot), then hurried to the Soviet Union.
After two and a half years of Soviet communism.  Oswald
recanted.  Now with a Russian wife and a daughter in tow, he
returned to the United States, explaining in a written
statement that "the Soviets have committed crimes unsurpassed
even by their early-day capitalist counterparts."

So was he a good patriot again?  No, now he announced himself
to be a member of the Communist Party and became the founding
and sole member of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play
for Cuba Committee, three times passing out pro-Castro
leaflets in New Orleans.
w Orleans chapter of the Fair Play
for Cuba Committee, three times passing out pro-Castro
leaflets in New Orleans.

Yet, paradoxically, Oswald's frequent companion that summer
in New Orleans was the militant anticommunist David Ferrie,r
with whom he had joined in loud public condemnations of
Castro and J.F.K.  During this same period, Oswald also spent
time with Banister.  He stamped Banister's office address on
his pro-Castro leaflets and stored his extra copies there.
He and Banister twice visited the campus of Louisiana State
University and made themselves conspicuous in discussions
with students in which their main theme was that J.F.K. was a
traitor.  Not once during this time did Oswald associate with
anyone actually sympathetic to Castro.

Oswald left New Orleans on September 25, 1963, and on the
next day in Mexico City, according to the Warren
reconstruction, registered as O. H. Lee at the Hotel del
Comercio, a meeting place for anti-Castro Cuban exiles.  He
spent the next several days trying to get visas for travel to
Cuba and the Soviet Union.  In the process, he got into a
prolonged row with a Cuban consular official.

The CIA had the Soviet and Cuban embassies staked out.  It
was later able to produce several photos of Oswaldo taken at
these sites--as well as to supply tapes of several phone
conversions between a Soviet embassy official and a man
calling himself Oswald.  There was a problem with the photos:
They showed a large, powerfully built man in his mid-30s not
in the least resembling Oswald.  And there was a problem with
the tapes: The CIA destroyed them, and the transcriptions
contained garbled Russian, whereas Oswald was considered to
be fluent in Russian.  Even the row with the Cuban official
presented a problem: Interviewed by the Select Committee on
Assassinations in 1978, the official said his Oswald was not
the same one as the man arrested in Dallas.  Moreover, two
CIA spies working inside the Cuban consulate in 1963 agreed
that "the real Oswald never came inside."  They told the
House Committee that they sensed "something weird was going
on" in the Oswald incident.

There is also abundant evidence that Oswald was often
impersonated quite apart from the alleged Mexico City trip.

Item: An FBI memo dated January 3, 1960, noted that "there is
a possibility that an impostor is using Oswald's birth
certificate."  The real Oswald was in the Soviet Union at
this time.

Item: Two salesmen at the Bolton Ford dealership in New
Orleans were visited on January 20, 1961, by a Lee Oswald in
the company of a powerfully built Latino.  Oswald was looking
for a deal on the pickup trucks needed by the Friends of
Democratic Cuba.  On this date, Oswald was in the Soviet
Union.

Item: On September 25, 1963, a man calling himself Harvey
Oswald showed up at the Selective Service office in Austin to
request help in getting his discharge upgraded from
undesirable.  On this date, Oswald was supposedly in transit
to Mexico City.

Item: A highly credible Cuban emigree, Sylvia Odio, told the
Warren Commission that she was visited in Dallas by Oswald
and two other men recruiting support for the anti-Castro
cause.  On the date of this encounter, the Warren Commission
placed Oswald either in New Orleans or en route to Mexico.

Item: On November 1, 1963, a man later identified by three
witnesses as Oswald entered a gun shop in Fort Worth and made
a nuisance of himself while buying ammunition.  The Warren
Commission mad evidence that Oswald was at work in Dallas
that day.

Item: On November 9, 1963, when Warren Commission evidence
placed Oswald at home in Irving, Texas, a man calling himself
Lee Oswald walked into a Lincoln-Mercury showroom in Dallas
and asked to take a car for a test drive.  The salesman found
the ride unforgettable in that Oswald reached speeds of 70
miles an hour while delivering a harangue about capitalist
credit and the superiority of the Soviet system.  Oswald, in
fact, did not know how to drive a car.

Curiouser and curiouser, this Oswald who was all over the map
and all over the political spectrum, in New Orleans and Fort
Worth and Austin and Mexico City all at once, here a radical
and there a reactionary.  What to make of this man?

"This question became a very practical one for me," says
Garrison, "on the day the President was killed and Oswald's
picture was flashed around the world.  As his resume filled
in over the next day and we found that he'd spent that summer
in New Orleans, it became my duty as D.A. to see what we
could find out about him."

Garrison soon discovered Oswald's ties to Ferrie.  He brought
Ferrie in for questioning on Monday the 25th, the day after
Ruby murdered Oswald, then turned Ferrie over to the FBI for
further questioning.  "In those days," Garrison recalls, "I
still believed in the FBI.  They questioned Ferrie, found him
clean and released him with a strange statement to the effect
that they wouldn't have arrested him in the first place, that
it was all my idea.  Then they put a SECRET stamp on their
forty-page interrogation report.  But what did I know?  I had
burglaries and armed robberies to worry about.  I went back
to the real world.  I was happy to do so."

Garrison's happy file in the real world came to an end for
good about three years later.  He at first saw no problem
when the Warren Report was published in September 1964,
holding that Oswald was a lone nut and Ruby another one.
"Warren was a great judge and, one thought, wholly honest."
Here and there a few spoilsports--Mark Lane, Edward J.
Epstein, 'Harold Weisberg, Penn Jones, Sylvia Meagher, Josiah
Thompson--were discovering problems with Warren's double
lone-nut thesis, but Garrison was inclined as most Americans
were to go along with it.  "It seems the easiest position to
take," he says, "especially since the war in Vietnam was
getting nasty and Americans of critical spirit were now
caught up more in the mysteries of Saigon than in those of
Dealey Plaza."

Then in 1966 came a fateful chance meeting with Louisiana's
Senator Russell Long.  The conversation turned to the Kennedy
case.  Long astounded Garrison by saying, "Those fellows on
the Warren Commission were dead wrong.  There's no way in the
world that one man could have shot up Jack Kennedy that way."

Garrison immediately ordered the Warren Report plus the 26
volumes of its hearings and exhibits.  He plunged in,
dedicating his evenings and weekends to the case.

He expected to find "a professional investigation," he says,
but "found nothing of the sort. . . .  There were promising
leads everywhere that were never followed up, contradictions
in the lone-assassin theory that were never resolved."

In particular, he was troubled by evidence that:

* Shots were fired from the so-called grassy knoll to the
front and right of J.F.K. as well as from behind.

* The maximum number of shots the alleged murder weapon could
have fired was inadequate to account for the total number of
bullet holes found in Kennedy and Texas Governor John
Connally (who barely survived) unless one of the bullets had
magically changed its direction in mid-flight.

* Nitrate tests performed on Oswald when he was arrested
supported his claim that he had not fired a rifle in the
previous 24 hours.

* Oswald appeared to have been trained as an intelligence
agent in the Marines, which implied that his awkward display
of sympathy for communism was phony.

Any one of these possibilities, Garrison realized, was enough
to reduce the Oswald-acting-alone theory to ruins.  "I was
stunned," he says.  "There were nights I couldn't sleep."

Finally, in November 1966, as he puts it, "I bit the magic
bullet."  Basing his jurisdiction on Oswald's 1963 summer in
New Orleans, he secretly opened an investigation into the
President's murder.

Of the four New Orleanians of primary interest to Garrison,
the most interesting of all was Oswald himself, since Oswald
had in a sense become Garrison's client.  But he was dead.
Next most interesting was Guy Banister, clearly at the center
of New Orleans' anti-Castro scene.  But Banister had died,
too, of a heart attack in 1964.

Third came David Ferrie, quite alive in 1966.  Garrison's
investigators started compiling a portrait of Ferrie as a
talented and impassioned anticommunist, a far-right soldier
of fortune whose relationship with the reputedly procommunist
Oswald during the summer of 1963 posed a question critical to
the clarification of Oswald's purposes--namely, as Garrison
puts it, "What the hell were these guys doing together?"

By reconstructing the 1963 relationships of Oswald with
Ferrie and Banister, Garrison hoped finally to make sense of
the bundle of contradictions that was Oswald.  But he never
got a chance to do a proper job of it.

A bright young reporter for the New Orleans States-Item,
Rosemary James, was routinely nosing through the D.A.'s
budget in February 1967 when she noticed some unusual
expenses.  Garrison's men had spent some $8000 during the
previous three months on such things as trips to Texas and
Florida.  What could they be up to?  A few questions later
and she had the story.

D.A. HERE LAUNCHES FULL J.F.K. DEATH-PLOT PROBE read the
headline on the February 17 States-Item.  MYSTERIOUS TRIPS
COST LARGE SUMS.  James's lead ran, "The Orleans parish
district attorney's office has launched an intensive
investigation into the circumstances surrounding the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

In the ensuing pandemonium, Garrison found himself under
enormous pressure from city hall and the media.  He felt he
had begun to build a strong conspiracy case against Ferrie in
that Ferrie clearly hated J.F.K. and clearly had a tie to
Oswald, but that it was still not time to arrest him.  His
staff was meeting to debate the timing of Ferrie's arrest
when word came that Ferrie had been found dead in this
apartment, killed by a brain anenurysm.  The coroner ruled
the cause of death as natural, but Garrison saw indications
of suicide: an empty bottle of Proloid--a medicine that could
have pushed the hypertense Ferrie's metabolism over the red
line--plus two typewritten and unsigned suicide notes.

Within hours came a report that Ferrie's militant
anticommunist comrade, Eladio del Valle, had been found in a
car in Miami, shot point-blank through the heart and with his
head hatcheted open.

Now what?  The stage was filled with enough dead bodies for
an Elizabethan tragedy, and two of Garrison's key suspects
were among them.  Just one other was left.

Clay Shaw, born in 1913, was one of New Orleans' best known
and most impressive citizens, a charming, richly cultivated
and cosmopolitan businessman, a much-decorated Army officer
during World War Two detailed to the Office of Special
Services and a founder and director of the International
Trade Mart, a company specializing in commercial expositions.
Shaw retired in 1965 to pursue interests in the arts,
playwrighting and the restoration of the French Quarter,
where he lived.  He was a silver-haired, handsome bon vivant
with high cheekbones, a ruddy complexion and an imposing
six-foot-four frame.

Garrison had come to believe that he was part of the J.F.K.
conspiracy.  Research had turned up indication that Shaw was
the mysterious Clay Bertrand who had phoned New Orleans
attorney Dean Andrews on the day after the J.F.K. hit to see
if Andrews could arrange legal representation for Oswald.
Garrison had found that Shaw led a double life in the New
Orleans gay community and that Shaw was a friend of Ferrie's,
who had been his pilot on at least one round trip to
Montreal.  Garrison had a witness, Perry Russo, who claimed
to have been present when Ferrie, Shaw and a man Russo
thought was Oswald discussed assassinating J.F.K.

More important, one of the D.A.'s assistants, Andrew
Sciambra, had discovered an Oswald-Shaw link in clinton, a
rural Louisiana town.  Dozens of people had seen Oswald in
Clinton on two occasions in early September 1963, once as a
passenger in a battered old car driven by a young woman and
later in a shiny black cadillac with two other men who waited
for hours while Oswald, the only white in a long line of
blacks, tried unsuccessfully to register to vote.  Five
Clinton witnesses testified that the men with Oswald were
David Ferrie and Clay Shaw.  The local marshal, curious about
strange Cadillacs in town, traced the license plate to the
International Trade Mart.  He talked to the driver and later,
at the trial, identified him as Shaw.

Garrison knew that such fragments didn't add up to an
airtight conspiracy case.  When I asked him if he was
surprised to lose, he said, "Not really.  I'm too good a
trial lawyer.  So why did I go to trial against Clay Shaw?
Because I knew that somehow I has stumbled across the big toe
of someone who was involved in one of the biggest crimes in
history.  And I was not about to become the person who did
that and then let go and said, 'Oh, I might be violating a
regulation.'"

Looking back, does he think this was an error?

"If it was an error, then it was an error that I was obliged
to make."

But Garrison did not leap blindy into the prosecution of one
of New Orleans' leading citizens.  He first presented his
evidence to a panel of three judges.  They told him he had a
case.  Then he presented the evidence to a 12-member gradn
jury.  The grand jury also ruled that there was sufficient
evidence to try Shaw.  And at that point, the decision was
out of Garrison's hands: The law required him to proceed.
Shaw's lawyers went all the way to the Supreme Court with an
argument that the case should be thrown out, and they lost.
After Shaw was acquitted, he filed a $5,000,000 damages suit
against Garrison for wrongful prosecution; the Supreme Court
dismissed it.

But Garrison's case ran into many strange problems.  One of
his assitants provided the list of state's witnesses to
Shaw's attorneys.  An FBI agent with detailed knowledge of
anti-Castro projects in New Orleans refused to testify for
the prosecution, pleading executive privilege.  The U.S.
Attorney in Washington, D.C., "declined" to serve Garrison's
subpoena on Allen Dulles, CIA chief at the time of the Bay of
Pigs, who was in a position to clarify the relationship
between Ferrie, Banister, Shaw and the CIA.  The governors of
Ohio, Nebraska and other states refused on technical grounds
to honor Garrison's requests for the extradition of important
witnesses.  A federal agent told Garrison privately--but
refused to testify--that Ferrie, Shaw and Banister were
involved in handling Oswald.  A witness critical to
establishing that Shaw used the alias Clay Bertrand, a key
issue, was not allowed to present his evidence.

Some of these difficulties may have arisen because, as later
became known, both Shaw and Ferrie were contract agents of
the CIA.  This was revealed in 1974 when a former aide to CIA
director Richard Helms, Vitor Marchetti, noted he had heard
Helms wonder aloud if the CIA were giving Shaw and Ferrie
"all the help they need.:

Without this knowledge, the jury got the case on March 1,
1969, two years to the day after Shaw's arrest.  It took a
little less than an hour to conclude unanimously that Shaw
was not guilty of conspiring to kill Kennedy.  In postrial
interviews, some jurors said Garrison convinved them that a
conspiracy existed but not that Shaw had been a part of it.
The Garrison who two years previously had promised.  "We  to
win this case, and everyone who bets against us is going to
lose his money," could now sit down for a long, slow chew.

The loss didn't hurt him at the polls.  He recroded his most
lopsided victory ever in the elections of 1969.

But the story wasn't over.

Garrison had just risen from his breakfast and was still in
his pajamas and robe when the dorrbell rang.  It was a posse
of IRS men, there to arrest him on a charge of allowing
pinball gambling in exchange for a bribe.

This was June 30, 1971.  About two years later, in August
1973, the trial was held, Garrison arguing his own case (with
the donated help of F. Lee Bailey).  His defense revolved
around one powerful basic point, namely that the government's
star witness against him, his former wartime buddy and
colleague, Pershin Gervais, had been bribed by the government
to make the accusation.

Garrison was acquitted of the bribery charge as well as of a
follow-up charge of tax evasion the government pressed
against him in 1974.  "A thing like that," he says, "can be
enjoyable if you have a cause and you're wrapped up in it.
I'd say it was one of the high spots of my life.  It was
nothing to feel sorry about.  I never went to bed with tears
on my pillow."

But another kind of attack on Garrison began about this time,
most often in the work of other conspiracy theorists who
began to wonder why Garrison said nothing about Mafia
involvement in the J.F.K. hit.  There were Mobsters all
around Jack Ruby.  The New Orleans godfather, Carlos
Marcello, was right in Garrison's back yard.  A Marcello
lawyer worked with Ferrie.  Ferrie was with Marcello cello
the day J.E.K. was shot.  Yet Garrison seemed to ignore all
this.

The charge is raised by writes (notably G. Robert Blakey and
John H. Davis) who champion a Mafia-did-it theory of the
crime and who themselves spend little ink on the evidence
pointing to renegade federal agents.  But Garrison's position
on Mafia involvement was reflected in the 1979 report of the
Select Committee on Assassinations (Blakey was its chief
counsel), which stated that "the national syndicate of
organized crime, as a group, was not involved in the
assassination."  As for the presence of individual Mobsters,
Garrison was among the first to see it.  An FBI memo of March
28, 1967, reported that "Garrison plans to indict Carlos
Marcello in the Kennedy assassination conspiracy because
Garrison believes Marcello is tied up in some way with Jack
Ruby."  According to another FBI memo, June 10, 1967,
"District Attorney Garrison believes that organized crime was
responsible for the assassination," the memo going on to
explain Garrison's fear that the Mafia wanted to blame the
crime on Castro and thus spark a U.S. retaliation that would
lead to restoration of the Mafia's control of Cuban casinos.

More recently, Garrison has written that "Mob-related
individuals do figure in the scenario."  After all, the CIA
and the Mafia shared an interest in Castro's overthrow, as is
evident in their murderous alliance of Tast Force W.

But Garrison does not believe that the Mafia could have set
up Oswald, controlled the investigation of the crime and
influenced the conclusions reached by the Warren Commission.
"The CIA hired the Mafia," he points out, "not the other way
around.  If Carlos Marcello had killed J.F.K. on his own, he
would never have gotten away with it."

The merits of the CIA-vs.-Mafia debate aside, however, this
was not a great time for Garrison.  He lost a close race in
the next election, and in 1974 left the D.A.'s office after
12 years of service.  He spent the next few years in what he
calls his interregnum, a period of relative quiet in which he
wrote his one novel, The Star-Spangled Contract, a fictional
treatment of his view of the J.F.K. hit.  That period ended
in his successful campaign for a seat on the Louisiana court
of appeals in 1977.  He was inaugurated to a ten-year term in
1978 and reelected in 1987.  He reached mandatory retirement
age of 70 in November 1991.

During the Seventies, the J.F.K. case suddenly shot forward.
Watergate and the resignation of President Nixon had already
put the country in mood to listen to conspiracy theories when
Mafia boss Sam Giancana was shot down in his home on June 19,
1975, five days before he was to testify to a Senate
committee.  On July 28, 1976, mafioso John Roselli was
asphyxiated, dismembered and dumped into Miami's Dumfounding
Bay.  Giancana and Roselli had both been deeply involved in
the CIA-Mafia plots.  The atmosphere created by these events
persuaded the House of Representatives by a vote of 280-65 to
enact H.Res. 1540, which established the Select Committee on
Assassinations.

That was September 17, 1976.  Two and a half years and
$6,500,000 later, this committee reported its findings: that
conspiracy was "probable" in the death of J.F.K. and a
"likelihood" in the 1968 death of Martin Luther King, Jr.  In
neither case could the House committee offer a solution.

But then came the Reagan years.  The new Justice Department
found the conspiracy evidence unconvincing and decided not to
bother about it.  And there the case has stood for the past
decade--"stuck," as Garrison says, "not for want of something
to do but for want of a government with the will to do it."

But Garrison is not resigned.

"Who killed President Kennedy?"  he demands, just as though
he still expected an answer.  "That question is not going to
disappear, no matter what the government does not do.  It may
fade into the background sometimes, but something will always
evoke it again, as Oliver's movie is about to do now.  It's
basic to who we are as a people.  We can no more escape it
than Hamlet can escape his father's ghost."

But what can Hamlet do three decades later?

"There's a lot to do," says Garrison, "and since well over
half the American people still gag on the lone-nut theory,
there would appear to be a supportive constituency."

Garrison's program:

"First, open the files that the Warren Commission and the
House committee classified as secret until the year 2039.

"Second, declassify the House committee's so-called Lopez
Report, a 265-page document on Oswald's supposed trip to
Mexico.  Lopez himself has said he believes Oswald was set
up.  Why is this report still secret?

"Third, declassify all the files on Operation Mongoose and
the CIA-Mafia murder plots.  The Mongoose group seems to be
at the center of the J.F.K. conspiracy.  We need to know
every detail about it.

"And, no, these steps will not crack the case, but they will
help us understand it better, and we can move on from there."

Someone else who had put so much into such a cause and who
had so often been abused for his pains might feel defeated to
have to settle for such small demands as these, and to
realize that, small as they are, they are almost certainly
not going to be met.

But Garrison doens't see it that way.  "The fight itself has
been a most worthy one," he say quietly.  "Most people go
through their lives without the opportunity to serve an
important cause.  It's true that I've made some mistakes and
had some setbacks.  But who knows?  To man-handle a line from
The Rubaiyat: The moving finger has not stopped moving on
yet.  The full story's not in."

His smile becomes a beam.  A light dances in his eyes.

"Clarence Darrow lost the Scopes trial," he says.  "But who
remembers that today?"

Title:       Full disclosure. (cold-war secrets)

Authors:     Ferguson, Greg
Citation:    U.S. News & World Report, Feb 3, 1992 v112 n4
             p15(1)

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Subjects:    Germany, East. Office of National
               Security_Investigations
             United States. Central Intelligence
               Agency_Investigations
             Communist Party (Soviet Union)_Investigations

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A11839899

=============================================================

Abstract: New cold-war information may be coming to light
          concerning the John Kennedy assassination, the
          Soviet communist party, CIA activities and the
          activities of the East German secret police.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT U.S. News and World Report Inc. 1992

JFK's assassination.  There are still 848 sealed boxes of
evidence from the 1977 congressional investigation into the
murder, with more at the CIA and FBI.  Spurred by the furor
over Oliver Stone's movie "JFK," Reps. Louis Stokes and Henry
Gonzalez, who chaired the probe, and House Speaker Thomas
Foley are calling for the release of all the government
files.  Stokes warns that the documents will offer little new
information, but he hopes they will quell speculation about
an official coverup.

Former Soviet Union.  A British company has bought the rights
to market all of the Soviet Communist Party's documents, 70
million items chronicling nearly all of Soviet history.  The
first batch of 300,000 files, due out next fall, covers the
lives of early leaders and includes supersecret files on Leon
Trotsky, the Red Army leader who was later exiled and
murdered by Communists.

CIA.  The recently created "Openness Task Force" is likely to
yield new details about the 1961 By of Pigs invasion and the
CIA's assassination attepmts on Cuba's Fidel Castro.  the
CIAA's role in the 1953 return of the shah to Iran could also
come to light.

Stasi.  Since early January, 300,000 residents of eastern
Germany have applied to see the dossiers that the secret
police kept on them.  The Stasi, with 90,000 agents and up to
a million informants, assembled an estimated 6 million files.
Germans are now learning that family and friends were
informers.  Teachers were even enlisted to spy on
schoolchildren.

Title:       Open minds, closed files. (Kennedy assassination
             files) (Brief Article)
Citation:    Time, Feb 3, 1992 v139 n5 p25(1)

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Subjects:    United States. Congress. House. Select Committee
               on Assassinations_Records and correspondence

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination;  Stokes,
             Louis_Political activity

Reference #: A11859529

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1992

After the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded
its 1979 investigation of the death of John F. Kennedy, its
files were stored away in 848 cartons deep within the
National Archives. Most were supposed to remain sealed there
until the year 2009.  But as a result of the fuss created by
Oliver Stone's film JFK, researchers may be able to sift
through the boxes much sooner.  Ohio Congressman Louis
Stokes, the Democrat who chaired the committee, pledged last
week to push a House resolution lifting the 30-year secrecy
rule.

The committee concurred with the Warren Commission's finding
that the President was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.  But it
also concluded that Kennedy's assassination was "probably"
the result of a conspiracy because a controversial acoustic
analysis of audiotapes from the shooting seemed to indicate
that a second gunman had fired a shot at the President.

What would conspiracy theorists find if the files were
opened? Not much that has not already been made public except
for some classified documents that contain CIA and FBI
sources and methods. "There's no smoking gun in there,"
scoffs G. Robert Blakey, the assassination committee's chief
counsel.

CAPTION: Kennedy's grave: Could secrets be sealed in the
National Archives?

Title:       Minority report. (Column)

Authors:     Hitchens, Christopher
Citation:    The Nation, Feb 3, 1992 v254 n4 p114(1)

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Subjects:    Assassination_History
             United States. Central Intelligence
               Agency_Political activity
             JFK (Motion picture)_Criticism, interpretation,
               etc.
             Mafia_Political activity

People:      Stone, Oliver_Criticism, interpretation, etc.;
             Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A11849663

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Abstract: Oliver Stone's portrayal of John Kennedy as
          idealistic in the film "JFK" is false. Kennedy was
          actively involved with the CIA and Mafia in
          destabilization plots in Cuba, and it is likely
          that his death came at the hands of the same forces
          he himself set in motion.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1992

I shall never be able to forget where I was standing on that
dramatic day when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly
killed me.  It was during the nuclear confrontation that
arose out of his war on Cuba.  In 1968 I visited the island
in question and went to see a movie by the revolutionary
director Santiago Alvarez.  It was an agitprop piece called
LBJ.  The L, B and J of the title turned out to stand for
"Luther, Bobby and Jack," and the whole film consisted of a
none-too-elegant suggestion that Lyndon Baines Johnson was
the usurping despot who had profited by, if not instigated,
these three shattering American murders.

In October 1976, a Cuban civil airliner was blown up in
midair as it left Barbados.  All those aboard were killed.
Among the flight attendants was the wife of Santiago Alvarez.
The man arrested and jailed for organizing this
then-unprecedented atrocity was a Cuban exile of the extreme
right named Luis Posada Carrilles.  He was and is a friend of
Felix Rodriguez, another ultrarightist and a C.I.A. agent who
assisted in the murder of The Guevara and who, by dint of
yeoman service in Vietnam and El Salvador, became a trusted
friend of Donald Gregg.  Mr. Gregg, who now serves as
Ambassador to South Korea, was national security adviser to
George Bush during the latter's shady vice presidency.  Bush
was also Director of Centrla Intelligence at the time of the
slaughter of the crew and passengers of the Cuban airliner.

You would have to be a complete paranoid to see any
connection between any of the above facts.  There is, in the
strict sense of consciousness and organization, no
"connection" between then at all.  They merely describe one
aspect, and not the prettiest one, of the way things happen
to be.  It was highly likely, but not at all predetermined,
that George Bush would be sitting in Langley at a time when a
deniable subordinate of one of his deniable subordinates
"went too far" in the execution of a policy--the
destabilization of Cuba--that had been approved and
sanctioned at a superior level.  It would have taken a
conspiracy to prevent such coincidences--an open conspiracy
to contain the national security state and subject its agents
to the rule of law--and such conspiracies, as we know, never
occur.

I don't know if Oliver Stone ever saq LBJ, but if he did it
helped give him the wrong idea (as well as the notion of a
hieroglyphic three-letter film title).  The dated,
reactionary concept of President Kennedy as some young
Siegfried of idealism is as stupid and ahistorical as the
narcissistic pretense that a post-Hiroshima, post-McCarthy
America was a country with "innocence" to "lose."  Johnson
himself, who was by no means a man of scruple, was shocked to
receive a C.I.A. briefing on the Kennedy brothers and their
Cuba policy, and exclaimed that his predecessor had been
"running a god-damned Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean,"
which was no more than the truth.

But the fact that Kennedy was a howling little shit doesn't
prove that there wasn't a plot to do him in.  Indeed, like
many a godfather before him, he may have been slain by
precisely the same forces that he himself set in motion.  If
you run with the Mafia and with the scum of the Havana
underworld, as Kennedy did and as "rogue elements" in his own
C.I.A. were ordered to do, you run with people who believe in
revenge.  You also run with people who are irrational.  It
makes no sense for a thinking person to conclude that Kennedy
wanted to end the cold war racket, but the cold war
racketeers themselves were certainly crazy enough to see him
as a traitor, and we happen to know that the Cuban
exile/Mafia leadership did think this way.

The goons, of course, would not on their own have had the
power to order a cover-up.  But those who had covertly used
the goons would have every reason to conceal even a rumor of
their part in an assasination of the head of state.  Allen
Dulles (who served both as C.I.A. overseer of the Mafia
operations in Cuba and as a member of the Warren Commission)
went to great lengths to prevent the Warren Commission from
finding out what the Church Committee was, twelve years too
late, to make public.  If Congress and the press had known of
the Kennedy-Giancana-Rosselli connection in 1963, they
obviously could not have been tranquilized so easily.

On this analysis, and given Lee Harvey Oswald's ties to the
Cuban exile and criminal milieu, it doesn't matter whether he
acted alone or not.  As Eric Ambler puts it in A Coffin for
Dimitrios, in these cases it's not who pulls the trigger but
who pays for the bullet.  Obviously it would be disappointing
to find that Arlen Specter, now the ghastly Senator from
Pennsylvania, was forensically accurate when he devised the
idea of the "magic bullet."  But a conspiracy doesn't need
more than one assassin.  The question is not did Oswald act
alone but whom did he act for?

Why would a liberal icon like Earl Warren lend himself to
such an exercise in concealment?  For the same reason that
people like him always do--namely to insure the Establishment
version of "domestic tranquility."  Once admit the
C.I.A./Mafia/Kennedy triangle and, straightaway, the history
of the Cuban missile crisis is rewritten with Cuba as the
victim of aggression.  Furthermore, public confidence in the
probity of government is badly shaken.  A Warren Commission
staffer named Melvin Eisenberg recalls Warren saying, after a
meeting with L.B.J., "The President stated that rumors of the
most exaggerated kind were circulating in the country and
overseas" and "if not quenched, could conceivably lead the
country into a war which could cost 40 million casualties.
No one could refuse to do something which might help prevent
such a possibility."  By a nice coincidence, this was exactly
the rationale offered by Arthur Liman for his own role in
muffling the Congressional iran/contra inquiry.  As he said
at Brown University on March 1, 1988: "Even if you concluded
that the President was involved in the diversion, an
impeachment process has a huge price.  In a nuclear age it's
something to be used sparingly.  We were all very mindful of
the fact that there was an opportunity for the negotiations
with the Soviet Union . . . that if an impeachment process
was started, that opportunity would be lost."

Stone would have made a more radical and authentic film if he
had only depicted what we already know.

Title:       Where can I get the Warren report? (on the John
             F. Kennedy assassination) (Brief Article)

Authors:     Castro, Janice
Citation:    Time, Feb 10, 1992 v139 n6 p15(1)

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Subjects:    Assassination_Reports
             United States. President's Commission on the
               Assassination of President John F.
               Kennedy_Reports

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A11791294

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1992

Oliver Stone's film JFK has triggered a fresh outpouring of
interest in the Kennedy assassination and the conspiracy
theories challenging the official findings of the Warren
Commission Report. Hundreds of Americans have called federal
offices asking where they can get the book.  So where is it?
Produced in 1964 by the Government Printing Office, the
Warren Report was also published by Bantam, Doubleday,
McGraw-Hill and Popular Library (which collectively sold more
than 1 million copies).  But even though a snazzy edition
might move smartly up the charts about now, none of the
publishers are printing a fresh batch.  Check your local
library.

Title:       Stone's opening. (Oliver Stone's 'JFK')
             (Editorial)
Citation:    The Nation, Feb 17, 1992 v254 n6 p184(2)

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Subjects:    JFK (Motion picture)_Public opinion

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A11862202

=============================================================

Abstract: 'JFK,' the motion picture by Oliver Stone, has had
          a powerful impact on public opinion. The Dallas, TX
          police are releasing their files on the John
          Kennedy assassination, and legislation is being
          introduced to release the files of all government
          agencies.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1992

Recently, the Dallas Police Department ann it would release
its files on the Kennedy assassination. Representative Louis
Stokes, who was Chairman of the Select Committee on
Assassinations, is drafting a House resolution to authorize
the release of the remaining files of the committee's 1977-79
inquiry, as well as the release of the files of all
government agencies.

All this suggests that whatever one thinks of the ins and
outs, ups and downs, highways, byways and cul-de-sacs of the
conspiracy theory that dramatically unfolds in Oliver Stone's
JFK, the movie is a powerful one and has already had a
profound sociopolitical impact. Ransacking our literary,
theatrical and cinematic history for works that caused
similar rufflings of the Zeitgeist (though in different ways)
one comes up with Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Birth of a Nation,
Waiting for Lefty and The Grapes of Wrath.

Stone's film posited a counterimage to the Warren
Commission's findings with such force that the public is now
ready to take a fresh look at the evidence, old and
new-indeed demands it. Whatever one thinks of the real-life
Jim Garrison, his movie incarnation, played by Kevin Costner,
embarks on a cinematic quest that takes him into back alleys
and dark corners of the national life-places where many
believe the Warren Commission refused to go. Or so the
lingering residue of popular skepticism about its findings
strongly suggests. Stone's job was not to "solve" the actual
crime; it was to make effective cinema of the political
forces that were, in the words of one of the film's
characters, "in the air." In this he has succeeded and the
culture is the richer for it.

We have received scores of letters taking issue with this or
that Nation contributor's theory about what John E Kennedy
would or would not have done in Vietnam had he lived. The
debate on these issues will be played out on our Letters page
in a future issue. For now, we salute Oliver Stone and his
co-writer, Zachary Sklar, for doing what assassination buffs
and conspiratologists of all stripes had previously been
unable to do-rivet popular attention on a murky event in
American history and create the pressure needed to disgorge
the documents that can help illuminate it.

Title:       Who killed JFK? (new documentary 'The JFK
             Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes') (Brief
             Article)

Authors:     Wells, Jeffrey
Citation:    Entertainment Weekly, Feb 21, 1992 n106 p9(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Motion pictures_Production and direction
             The JFK Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes
               (Motion picture)_Production and direction

People:      Barbour, John_Production and direction;
             Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A12516288

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Entertainment Weekly Inc. 1992

And the conspiracy bandwagon rolls on. The latest movie to
hitch a ride on Oliver Stone's coattails is The JFK
Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes, a documentary that
stakes the same claim as Stone's - that Garrison (played by
Kevin Costner in JFK) had a credible case against New Orleans
businessman Clay Shaw for involvement in President Kennedy's
murder.

"The truth about Garrison and the trial has never really been
told, not even in JFK," says the documentary's
writer-director, John Barbour, a former Los Angeles TV
news-man and host of the hit television series Real People
from 1979-82. Barbour taped his Garrison interview in 1981
but was unable to obtain funding for a complete feature until
Stone's JFK began to stir interest last summer.

Tapes, which includes an interview with controversial former
Pentagon-CIA liaison officer Fletcher Prouty (on whom Donald
Sutherland's "Mr. X" character in JFK was loosely based),
will see some big screens but will mostly play on video. The
film is sure to draw a lot of flak from Garrison critics,
though Barbour insists that it "deals only with facts, with
hard evidence."

Title:       In defense of the Warren Commission. (U.C.L.A.
             law professor Wesley J. Liebeler)(Beat the
             Devil)(Column) (Interview)

Authors:     Cockburn, Alexander
Citation:    The Nation, March 9, 1992 v254 n9 p294(3)

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Subjects:    Presidents_Assassination
             Assassination_Investigations
             United States. President's Commission on the
               Assassination of President John F.
               Kennedy_Reports

People:      Liebeler, Wesley J.;  Kennedy, John
             F._Assassination

Reference #: A12053041

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Abstract: U.C.L.A. law professor Wesley J. Liebeler, former
          staff counsel on the Warren Commission, defends the
          Warren Commission report on the assassination of
          Pres John F. Kennedy.

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Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1992

In Defense of the Warren Commission

In mid-February, for the benefit of television viewers in
Australia, I found myself squaring off on the subject of JFK
against Fletcher Prouty and Carl Oglesby. Perched on a stool
beside me in a Los Angeles studio was Wesley J. Liebeler, a
60-year-old professor of law at U.C.L.A. Originally from
North Dakota and conservative/libertarian in political
outlook, Liebeler was one of the staff counsels on the Warren
Commission. Later, in a week when JFK got eight Academy Award
nominations, and when Richard Heffner, a Rutgers professor
who is also chairman of the motion picture industry's film
rating system, announced in the Los Angeles Times that JFK
marked the end of the Gutenberg era and the dawn of a new way
of telling history, I drove up to Zuma Beach and interviewed
Liebeler.

AC: What about the speed at which Oswald would have had to
fire his Mannlicher-Carcano? Critics of the Warren Commission
say Oswald could never have loosed off the shots in so short
a time.

WJL: The clock for the whole thing is the Zapruder film,
which runs at 18.3 frames a second. The film shows only two
shots striking the people in the car. A time fix on the first
shot can't be precise, for reasons I'll come back to. But the
time of impact of the second shot that struck is precise.
That was at frames 312-313 of the Zapruder film. At frame 313
the head just explodes. So either at 312 or 313, which is
practically the same instant. And that's the last shot for
which there is any evidence of anything in the car being
struck.

The first shot hit, in the view of the Warren Commission,
between frames 210 and 225. The commission came to that
conclusion based on the Zapruder film, which shows that at a
certain point Kennedy was reacting to a shot. He raises his
hands up. During part of that time the limousine is behind a
road sign, so it can't be seen for about .9 of a second. So
you can't tell how long before the reaction the shot actually
struck.

The House Assassination Committee  1978) said the first shot
struck around frame 190, which is a little sooner, about a
second. So to establish the time frame the Warren Commission
subtracted either 210 or 225 from 312, and divided that by
18.3. Let's say 210. This gives us 5.6 seconds. Take 313 and
subtract 225, and divide that by 18.3 and that gives 4.8
seconds. So the commission said that the time lapse between
the first shot that hit and the second shot that hit was
between 4.8 and 5.6 seconds.

If we assume that three shots were fired, you have the
question of which shot missed. The House committee concluded
that the first shot missed. The Warren Commission never
decided on the matter. The evidence is consistent with the
proposition that the first shot missed. If so, all Oswald had
to do was fire one more shot. So in fact he would have had
from 4.8 to 5.6 seconds to fire one shot, not three shots.

AC: So, on that explication, he's waiting with his gun aimed
The car comes along, he shoots and misses. But there's no
time fix as to when he might have fired that shot. It wasn't
in the famous 4.8 to 5.6 second interval He reloads and then
fires the shot that hits the President in the neck between
frames 210 or 225 according to the Warren Commission, or 190
according to the House committee.

WJL: Right. Now he has to reload (which takes a minimum of
2.3 seconds), work the bolt once and fire the third shot
that's fired (the second shot that strikes). And he has,
according to the Warren Commission, 4.8 to 5.6 seconds. That
is even time enough to fire twice, which he would have had to
do if the second shot missed. If, as the House committee
said, the first shot that hit was fired at frame 190, then
Oswald had 6.72 seconds to fire either one or two shots. That
is 313 minus 190, divided by 18.3. There was enough time.

You know, people harp on about the Warren Commission, which
is fine. But the House Assassination Committee confirmed
every single finding that the Warren Commission made-every
one, except on the conspiracy question.

AC: Well, what about that?

WJL: The only evidence for conspiracy that the House
committee had was a Dictabelt tape that recorded police radio
transmissions. That was discovered long after the event in a
file cabinet in the Dallas Police Department. There were two
different radio frequencies that the Dallas Police Department
used to transmit messages back and forth among the police.
Both those frequencies were separately recorded. The Warren
Commission didn't know anything about this evidence. When you
listen to the Dictabelt there's no sound of shots at all. But
the House committee took this Dictabelt and gave it to an
audio consulting firm in Boston that did an analysis and
found some pulses. The Dictabelt had been recording from a
motorcycle somewhere that had its microphone stuck open. The
consultants claimed they could distinguish four different
pulse phenomena, three of which could be made to correspond
to the shots we've just talked about, if you pushed the first
shot back to frame 190. And there was a fourth pulse. So the
consultants went down to Dealey Plaza, set up microphones,
fired off rifles and established what they called an audio
footprint, and said initially that there was a 50-50
probability of a shot fired from the grassy knoll. This was
in September of 1978. Then in December, right before the
House committee closed up shop on the hearings, the audio
consulting firm came up with a 95 percent probability on this
same shot. So on the basis of that evidence the 1978 House
committee concluded there was probably a conspiracy, that
there was a guy on the grassy knoll shooting, though he
didn't hit anybody. Robert Blakey, the committee's chief
counsel, then gave the Dictabelt to the Justice Department to
be analyzed further. Later he wrote a letter to National
Review saying that if the Justice Department's investigation
of the tape didn't bear out the 95 percent probability of
another shot, he'd retract the whole conspiracy theory.

Well, the Justice Department turned all this over to a panel
of acoustic experts set up by the National Research Council.
They figured out that sounds on both Dictabelts could be
matched, and since the one had a time reference, they could
fix the time frame on the other Dictabelt as well. The N.
R.C. acoustic committee then concluded that the sounds on the
second Dictabelt were recorded more than a minute after the
assassination occurred. So they didn't have anything to do
with the shots in Dealey Plaza.

AC: The other thing that seems to cause people a lot of
problems is the single-bullet theory" -the first shot that
hit Kennedy and also John Connally.

WJL: The first shot that hit went through the top of
Kennedy's back, came through the throat to the right of his
trachea, didn't hit any bones. Governor Connally was struck
right below the right armpit in the back. The bullet went
down through his chest cavity, came out just below his right
nipple, struck him on the back side of his right wrist at the
joint, broke the wrist and came out the front of his wrist
and entered his thigh, making a very shallow hole.

The pathology panel of the House committee and also the
Warren Commission concluded that the damage to Connally was
done by one bullet. Work it backwards. If his hand was on his
thigh, which is consistent with the Zapruder film, you know
that the bullet wasn't going very fast when it came out the
underside of the wrist, which has implications about how fast
it was going when it entered the wrist. If it had already
gone through Connally's chest cavity and the President's neck
it had been slowed down. A wounds ballistic expert testifying
to the House committee established that there's a range of
velocity within which a bullet will break a bone without
hurting the bullet, provided it's not going too fast.

Warren Commission Exhibit 399 is the so-called "magic" or
"pristine" bullet. It is neither one. It is in good shape,
but eight of the nine forensic pathologists on the House
committee medical panel agreed that it had gone through the
President's neck or upper back and then inflicted all of
Connally's wounds. Ask yourself where the bullet went after
it came out of the President's neck if it didn't hit
Connally. After coursing downward through the President's
body, where it hit no bone to deflect it, either it's got to
hit Connally, who is sitting right in front of him, or it's
got to hit the car. It didn't hit the car.

The Warren Commission did a re-enactment of the assassination
which showed that the President and Governor were located in
a way that the bullet would have gone directly from the exit
wound in the President's neck into Connally's back, The House
committee used a different method of calculating the
trajectory and unequivocally confirmed the Warren Commission
findings that one bullet-CE 399-did go through the President
and inflict the Governor's wounds. The House committee said
flatly that the trajectory it established supported the
single-bullet theory.

Oliver Stone's treatment of this question is simply a lie,
and he knows it. The House committee confirmed the Warren
Commission's findings on this point without qualification.
But with the conspiracy Stone has fabricated, the addition of
the House of Representatives won't cause any further
problems. He's got half the country in on it now.

I have challenged him to debate the validity of the Warren
Report. Naturally he issued a press release saying he'd be
happy to do it, but he never responded to me. He's engaged in
scholarship by press release. I repeat my challenge.

AC: In the Zapruderfilm, at frame 313, when the second bullet
strikes, Kennedy's head jerks back convulsively, and people
have reckoned this implies a shot from the front.

WJL: If you look at Kennedy's head, right at frame 313, just
as the bullet strikes it, it doesn't move backward. It moves
slightly to the left and downward, just for two or three
frames, which is consistent with a bullet striking it from
behind and nowhere else, because the momentum of the bullet
is imparted instantly.

Then shortly after frames 312-313 the President's body goes
backward. The House committee said there are two
explanations. One is the jet effect, caused by the skull and
brain exiting and forcing the head back and to the left.
Combined with that effect, the committee said, was a
neuromuscular reaction. The medical evidence is the best way
to determine the direction of the shots that hit the
President. Take the skull. The entry wound in the back of his
head is "coned" on the inside of the skull. What can be
constructed of the exit wound from the skull is coned on the
outside. The House medical panel all agreed to these
conclusions, and also that the wound on the President's upper
right back could only be an entrance wound. Eight of the nine
pathologists on that panel concluded that the President was
struck by two and only two shots. The medical evidence
excludes the possibility that the President was struck by a
shot fired from any direction other than behind him.

AC: Why didn't the Warren Commission have access to the
autopsy photographs and X-rays?

WJL: Warren didn't want to press Bobby Kennedy, who
controlled them, for their release. The worst consequence was
the idea that someone was trying to hide something. Without
these materials the autopsy surgeons described to the
commission their recollection of the wounds, and their
medical artist drew the diagrams showing the entrance wounds
in the wrong place.

AC: What happened to Kennedy's brain?

WJL: The brain was under Robert Kennedy's control when it
disappeared. it is widely believed that he destroyed it. He
was afraid that these materials might end up on public
display.

AC: Do you think the Warren Report was flawed?

WJL: It was too oracular, overwritten. Also I think it relied
too heavily on eyewitness testimony. The problem is that
people will testify to damn near anything. So the commission
had one eyewitness testifying that he saw Oswald sticking a
rifle through the sixth-floor window -  AC: But there was
another witness next to him who saw Oswald and another man
beside him.

WJL: Right. That's the problem. The only way you can avoid
that is to look at evidence that can be replicated. Evidence
that is here today, will be here tomorrow and 100 years from
now: the autopsy photographs; the autopsy X-rays; the
ballistics tests. The bullet that was found on the stretcher
was fired from Oswald's rifle to the exclusion of all other
rifles; the two big fragments in the car were fired from that
rifle to the exclusion of all other rifles; that rifle was on
the sixth floor of the School Book Depository; it had
Oswald's print on it; there was a brown paper bag there that
had Oswald's palm print on it; it was a long bag that would
have held a rifle. At this point it would be nice to have an
eyewitness who said that when he gave Oswald a ride to work
that morning he had the bag with him, and there was one. But
fine, never mind how the bag got there. We know it was
Oswald's rifle because he rented a post office box and his
handwriting is on the application; he ordered the rifle and
his handwriting is on the paper he ordered the rifle with; he
wrote out a money order and his handwriting is on that; and
the rifle was sent to his post office box. There are a number
of pictures of Oswald with a rifle. The House Assassination
Committee, with improved enhancement techniques that the
Warren Commission didn't have, was able to prove it was the
same rifle. The negative was found and it had been taken from
Oswald's camera to the exclusion of all other cameras. George
de Mohrenschildt had a copy of that picture with Oswald's
handwriting on the back. There's no evidence of tampering on
the negative; the scratch marks are the same. The picture was
taken six months before the assassination. We have
photographic evidence, like the Zapruder film. On the Tippit
shooting, we've got forensic evidence that shows clearly
Tippit was killed by bullets from the gun Oswald was carrying
when he was arrested. So you can make out a pretty good case
just on the basis of the physical evidence.

Why did Oswald kill the President? The man was a malcontent,
not happy, not stupid by any stretch of the imagination, but
unhappy and discontented. I guess your typical liberal
[laughs). Not that. I guess he would have as much contempt
for liberals as you or I. He was a revolutionary of one form
or another. I drafted a psychological profile of Oswald for
chapter seven of the report. It was reviewed by a panel
including the chief of psychiatry at the Mayo Clinic, who
threw my draft down and said, "This is very interesting
stuff, but it tells me a lot more about you, Liebeler, than
it does about Oswald." So how the hell do I know why Oswald
killed the President?

Title:       Recapturing the past. (panel discussion on
             Oliver Stone's film "JFK") (Editorial)
Citation:    The Nation, March 23, 1992 v254 n11 p361(1)

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Subjects:    JFK (Motion picture)_Criticism, interpretation,
               etc.

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A12112515

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Abstract: The panel discussion "Hollywood & History: The
          Debate over 'JFK'," held at Town Hall (New York,
          New York), ranged over more subjects than that of
          the accuracy of the film. Historical films often
          are attacked more for their politics than for
          inaccuracies. History is vitally important and
          should be debated.

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Full Text COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1992

Panel discussion, symposium, political psychodrama,
historical inquest? The March 3 event at Town Hall in New
York City, sponsored by The Nation Institute, the Center for
American Culture Studies, Columbia University and the Writers
Guild of America, East, was certainly all these. The
ostensible subject was Hollywood & History: The Debate over
JFK," but the talk covered far more ground than the
media-framed issue of the factual accuracy of Oliver Stones
movie. And, as noted by panelist Nora Ephron, co-screenwriter
of Silkwood, which was attacked in much the same way as JFK,
a movie's politics rather than a reverence for history is
often the real raison d'etre of such assaults.

As far as Oliver Stone was concerned it was history-and the
politics thereof-that was on trial rather than his movie. He
regarded the official version of the assassination as typical
of the pervasive untruths in received American history. But
Stone's version of events in Dallas was challenged by writer
Edward Jay Epstein and a panel of questioners. The director
had answers, not all of them satisfying to his inquisitors or
the audience. This is the Kennedy assassination, after all.
For every "fact" there is a counterfact, and opinions among
the illuminati run strong and deep. Still, the dialectic
informed, if it did not synthesize.

As panelist Norman Mailer observed, the assassination is the
great unresolved question of our time, and doubts about the
official story have left people in a Umbo "between apathy and
paranoia." He made an impassioned call for the formation of a
commission to find what answers remain to be found.

The event in Town Hall was about the politics of history-how
it is written, how it is interpreted, how it is conveyed and
portrayed. The moral is that history is not bunk. It is so
crucial that we must keep on debating it.

Title:       Did J.F.K. really commit suicide? (books on the
             assassination of John F. Kennedy)

Authors:     Ellis, David
Citation:    Time, April 13, 1992 v139 n15 p64(1)

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Subjects:    Assassination_Bibliography

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A12120963

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Abstract: Several new books have been released which espouse
          a myriad of theories as to who killed Pres Kennedy.
          The theories range from the reasonable to the
          bizarre, but all hope to capitalize on the renewed
          interest in the Kennedy assassination.

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Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1992

So you think America has lost its creative edge, that its
citizens can no longer devise innovative solutions to what
ails the country and the world?  Well, stroll through your
local bookstore and think again: no fewer than seven new
books on the Kennedy assassination have recently been
published.  Several have made it to the best-seller lists,
where they joined two paperbacks: On the Trail of the
Assassins by Jim Garrison and Crossfire by Jim Marrs, both of
which inspired Oliver Stone's film JFK.

The latest addition to the shelf is JFK: Conspiracy of
Silence (Signet; 205 pages; $4.99 paper) by Charles A.
Crenshaw.  It is the first account written by a doctor who
was part of the Parkland Memorial Hospital trauma team that
tried to save Kennedy and, two days later, his assassin
(sorry, alleged assassin), Lee Harvey Oswald.

Crenshaw says that until now, he and his colleagues refused
to "rock the boat" by publicly disputing the Warren
Commission's finding that Oswald was the lone assassin.  But
he is adamant that the head wound suffered by the President
came from the front of the motorcade, thus making it
impossible for Oswald to have murdered Kennedy from a
sixth-floor rear perch.  The physician says it is clear that
"someone had tampered with the body" during its extralegal
transfer from Texas to the autopsy room at Bethesda Naval
Hospital in Maryland, presumably to support a single-gunman
scenario.  The injuries shown on autopsy photos, Crenshaw
says, "are not the same wounds I saw at Parkland."

That theory isn't new, but Crenshaw's account contains a
vivid anecdote that will no doubt be seized upon by those who
argue that there was a government conspiracy.  When Oswald,
shot by Jack Ruby, wound up at Parkland, Crenshaw noted the
presence of a heavyset armed man in the operating room.
Moments later came a telephone call from Washington.  On the
other end of the line, according to Crenshaw, was Lyndon
Johnson, who demanded that the medical team obtain "a
deathbed confession from the accused assassin," to be
recorded by the mysterious agent. When Oswald died minutes
later, the man disappeared.

In The Texas Connection (Texas Connection Co.; 323 pages;
$21.95), Craig I. Zirbel claims to provide the "final answer"
on Johnson's role.  Zirbel says Johnson probably organized
the murder with a group of right-wing oilmen as a shortcut to
the Oval Office. The author provides no persuasive evidence
to support the allegation, relying instead on the argument
that Johnson was a murderer because he had the turpitude to
behave like one.  Zirbel ticks off Johnson's egomania,
drinking habits and philandering as examples of his
"violations of moral rules." The author dismisses opposing
speculations of why Kennedy was killed, saying the Mafia did
not participate in the assassination because "for a hit to
have been made against the President, [Chicago Mob boss] Sam
Giancana would have had to consent."

Surprise.  Double Cross (Warner Books; 366 pages; $22.95),
written by Giancana's brother Chuck and godson Sam, says that
is exactly what happened.  Chuck Giancana played the role of
underworld Candide, charting his brother's rise as the most
powerful Mob boss west of the Mississippi and taking note of
his snuff work for the CIA. "It's beautiful," says Sam. "The
Outfit even has the same enemies as the government."

But the government soon became the enemy.  Although Giancana
boasted that he fixed votes, funneled thousands into the 1960
Democratic campaign and picked up girlfriend Judith Campbell
from J.F.K., the Kennedys forgot their debts to the Mob.  In
1961 New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello was deported in
Robert Kennedy's crackdown on organized crime.  An outraged
Giancana began monitoring the private lives of both brothers.
Along the way, the book says, Marilyn Monroe was murdered in
a Mafia attempt to blow the lid off her affair with R.F.K.
When that didn't play out, Giancana spent a year planning the
assassination, which was carried out by a loose association
of professional killers.  According to the book, Oswald was a
former spy sacrificed by anti-Kennedy elements in the CIA to
take the fall.  Then Ruby, Giancana's "Dallas
representative," dispatched Oswald.  The CIA turns up in Mark
Lane's Plausible Denial (Thunder's Mouth Press; 393 pages;
$22.95), which claims Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt played
a key role in killing J.F.K., who intended to disband the spy
agency.

For readers who want just a little spice added to the
Oswald-did-it scenario, there is Bonar Menninger's Mortal
Error (St.  Martin's Press; 361 pages; $23.95).  According to
Howard Donahue, a Baltimore ballistics expert, Kennedy was
killed by a Secret Service agent in the presidential
motorcade who accidentally discharged his AR-15 rifle.  But
Donahue says that Kennedy probably would have died anyway
from the neck wound inflicted by Oswald.  Among those
unconvinced by this scenario is Menninger's publisher, who
added a 17-page disclaimer to the book.

CAPTION: THE MOB or ...  A Mob hit, a betrayal, a crazed
zealot or a tragic accident -- readers can chose from many
scenarios.  Among those in the conspiracy theorists' lineup:
crime boss Sam Giancana, L.B.J., the "lone assassin," E.
Howard Hunt and a nervous Secret Service agent.

CAPTION: JOHNSON or ...  See above.

CAPTION: OSWALD or ...  See above.

CAPTION: THE CIA or ...  See above.

CAPTION: THE SECRET SERVICE ...  KILLED KENNEDY See above.

Title:       Assassination expert. (Atlanta Hawks vice
             president Pete Babcock)(Inside The NBA) (Brief
             Article)

Authors:     McCallum, Jack
Citation:    Sports Illustrated, April 13, 1992 v76 n14
             p74(2)

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Subjects:    Assassination_Investigations
             Atlanta Hawks_Officials and employees

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination;  Babcock,
             Pete_Conduct of life

Reference #: A12124357

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Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1992

Actually, for conspiracy theories, the man to talk to in the
NBA is Pete Babcock, the vice-president/general manager of
the Hawks.  Over the years Babcock has become an expert and
an occasional lecturer on the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy.  A closet in Babcock's house in suburban Atlanta
is filled with hundreds of slides, autopsy photos, index
cards, charts and magazine and newspaper articles relating to
the assassination.  And his bookcases are filled with more
than 50 tomes on the subject, as well as the 26 volumes of
the Warren Report, with which he is not in agreement.

Babcock was teaching American history at a Phoenix high
school in 1973 when he saw a film called Executive Action, a
fictionalized account of the assassination.  It started him
thinking, which led to study, which led to extensive
research, which led to obsession.  Babcock's lecture
appearances have increased recently, since the public's
interest in the subject has been rekindled by Oliver Stone's
movie JFK, which Babcock has seen twice.

Babcock does not subscribe to all of Stone's conspiracy
theories, but he also rejects the finding of the Warren
Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.  He believes
there had to be a second gunman, a conclusion he reached
largely by studying the Zapruder film, several copies of
which are part of his research materials.

"One reporter wanted to know how I had the answer to the
Kennedy assassination when I haven't figured out how to win
an NBA championship," says Babcock, who has held scouting or
executive positions with the Bucks, Clippers, Jazz, Lakers
and Nuggets as well as the Hawks, without earning a ring. "My
answer," he says, "is that I don't have all the answers to
either one."

Title:       JFK, the sequel. (danger of re-opening FBI files
             on the John F. Kennedy assassination)
             (Editorial)
Citation:    National Review, May 25, 1992 v44 n10 p14(1)

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Subjects:    Assassination_Investigations
             United States. Federal Bureau of
               Investigation_Reports

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A12270075

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Abstract: Oliver Stone's motion picture 'JFK' has generated
          interest in examining classified FBI files
          maintained during the investigation into Kennedy's
          death. If they are opened to public scrutiny,
          innocent witnesses could be hurt and future FBI
          reports would be written with too much caution.

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Full Text COPYRIGHT National Review Inc. 1992

OLD conspiracies never die, they simply snowball. In JFK
Oliver Stone went whole hog: it wasn't just a little cabal of
men who plotted to kill the President, it was the entire
government of the United States. Even the liberals found it
hard to believe that government could operate so efficiently,
and Stone was skewered for his fantasies.

Inside the Beltway, alas, fantasies all too often have
political consequences, and sure enough there was Oliver
Stone testifying the other day about opening the JFK
assassination files. This has attracted the support even of
folks who don't think the entire United  States was behind
Lee Harvey Oswald. Before we start opening our secret files,
it's probably worth knowing what those files are.

Most of them are statements taken by FBI agents. Every time
an FBI agent interviews a witness, he fills out what's called
an SD-302 form. Essentially it is a blank piece of paper on
which the agent records the interviewee's name, address,
etc.--and then the FBI agent's summary of what he has been
told. The witness neither swears to nor signs the statement;
only the agent's name appears.

As might be imagined, witnesses vary in credibility, and they
offer information that might be true, false, or fantastic.
Making it public would often hurt innocent people, an act of
irresponsibility akin to publishing a reportor's notes
without checking their accuracy. It will also guarantee that
in the future agents will put nothing of importance in their
files.

In the old days, we got around this problem by allowing the
people's elected representatives on special committees to
review all the secret files--in full context, and that's
important-to make sure nothing was amiss. But then some
members of these committees started to take it upon
themselves to release highly confidential information. This
in no small part contributed to the debacle of Vietnam and
its aftermath. If Mr. Stone really wants a juicy scandal to
put on the silver screen, there's one just waiting for him:
Congress.

Title:       Not the grassy knoll? (coroners who examined
             John F. Kennedy after his assassination maintain
             that both bullets came from the rear)
Citation:    Time, June 1, 1992 v139 n22 p21(1)

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Subjects:    Assassination_Investigations

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A12277435

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Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1992

CONSPIRACY BUFFS HAVE MADE MUCH OF THE FACT that the
pathologists who performed the autopsy on President Kennedy
never discussed their findings, except with House
investigators and the Warren Commission.  Last week the
doctors broke their silence, reasserting publicly that they
believe J.F.K. was shot by a lone gunman from the rear.
Their belated postmortem report will not end the debate, but
those who believe otherwise now have to contend with the
detailed description of a "beveled" hole punched in Kennedy's
skull that could have been made only by a bullet coming from
above and behind.

CAPTION: THE BULLET'S PATH: Doctors found bone fragments and
a telltale beveled crater

Title:       Examining 'JFK.' (motion picture)

Authors:     Breo, Dennis L.
Citation:    People Weekly, June 8, 1992 v37 n22 p49(2)

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Subjects:    Assassination_Investigations
             JFK (Motion picture)_Criticism, interpretation,
               etc.

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A12289293

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Abstract: The movie 'JFK' presents the idea that the
          assassination of Pres Kennedy was a conspiracy and
          that the evidence was suppressed. The Navy
          pathologists who examined Kennedy's body refute
          conspiracy theories 29 years after Kennedy's death.

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Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1992

IT 7:30 P.M. ON NOV.  22, 1963, U.S. NAVY pathologists James
Joseph Humes, then 39, and J. Thornton Boswell, then 41,
entered the newly built morgue of the Naval Medical Center in
Bethesda, Md., and watched as a bronze coffin with one broken
handle was carried into the chamber.  Opening the casket, the
two men found, swaddled in sheets, the naked body of John F.
Kennedy.  They lifted the President's corpse onto an
examination table and, for the next four hours, studied the
wounds that caused his death.  Turning in their findings,
Humes and Boswell then kept their silence for the next 29
years.

The multiplicity of conspiracy theories given new life
recently by Oliver Stone's JFK, however, has broken their
patience. "I am tired of being beaten upon by people who are
supremely ignorant of the scientific facts of the President's
death," Humes says.  Last week the respected Journal of the
American Medical Association published articles based on
extensive interviews with Humes and Boswell as well as four
doctors who attempted to save Kennedy's life in Dallas.  They
paint a compelling portrait not only of the medical evidence
but of the doctors' own feelings and of the sorrow and
courage of Jacqueline Kennedy.

Humes and Boswell take particular umbrage at theories that
the President was killed by two shots from the front and not
from behind as their autopsy examination -- and the Warren
Commission Report, which was based on it -- concludes.
Pointing toward a glass pane, Humes says, "If a bullet or a
BB were fired through that window, it would leave a small
hole where it entered and a beveled crater where it exited.
That is what [we] found when we examined the President's
skull.  There was a small elliptical entrance wound on the
outside of the back of the skull, where the bullet entered,
and a beveled larger wound on the inside of the back of the
skull where the bullet tore through and exploded out the
right side of the head." He adds, "If we stay here until hell
freezes over, nothing will change this proof.  It happens 100
times out of 100, and I will defend it until I die."

Humes and Boswell dispel other myths as well.  The President
did not arrive in a body bag, as some accounts claim.
Neither was the examination at the morgue stage-managed by
generals. "The President's military aides from the Air Force,
Army and Navy were all present [in the viewing theater],"
says Humes. "But they were not generals, and their influence
on the autopsy was zero." As for the restaging of the episode
in Oliver Stone's JFK, Humes tells his friend Boswell, "If
you see this movie, believe me, you'll need heavy sedation.
The autopsy bears no relation to reality; the man they have
playing me looks older than I am now." Humes confirms that he
burned his notes -- but only after copying their contents
verbatim at his home.  The original paper, he says, was
stained with the President's blood. "I did not want them to
become a collector's item."

All the doctors recall the pathos around them.  In Bethesda,
says Boswell, "the people who accompanied the President's
body to the morgue were the most disturbed and distressed
people I had ever seen." Adds Humes: "These people thought
they had let the President down, and now their hero was
gone." Boswell had wondered why the body had come to Naval
Medical Center in Bethesda instead of the more advanced
Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. "Later I
was told that Jackie Kennedy selected Bethesda because her
husband had been a Navy man."

In Dallas, Dr. M.T. "Pepper" Jenkins, who had been at the
President's side in Parkland Memorial Hospital's trauma room,
remembers the First Lady still reeling from the shooting,
which had occurred just five minutes earlier.  With blood
gushing down his jacket and onto his shoes, the chief of
anesthesiology noticed "Jacqueline Kennedy was circling the
room, walking behind my back.  The Secret Service could not
keep her out of the room.  She looked shell-shocked.  As she
circled and circled, I noticed that her hands were cupped in
front of her, as if she were cradling something. As she
passed by, she nudged me with an elbow and handed me what she
had been nursing in her hands -- a large chunk of her
husband's brain tissues.  I quickly handed it to a nurse."

At 1:00 P.M., a Catholic priest was called in to perform the
last rites, and the President was declared dead.  As the room
cleared and Jenkins disconnected tubes and ECG leads, he saw
the First Lady come back in. "I retreated to a corner of the
room.  She kissed the President on the foot, on the leg, on
the thigh, on the abdomen, on the chest, and then on the
face.  She still looked drawn, pale, shocked and remote.  I
doubt if she remembers any part of this.  Then the priest
began last rites in deliberate, resonant and slow tones, and
then it was over."

CAPTION: Dr. James Humes describes the movie JFK as
"absolutely false."

CAPTION: President Kennedy was pronounced dead 25 minutes
after his limousine arrived at Parkland Memorial Hospital in
Dallas.

CAPTION: Dr. J. Thornton Boswell says nobody interfered with
the autopsy.

CAPTION: During her husband's funeral at Arlington National
Cemetery, Jackie Kennedy was consoled by her brothers-in-law
Bobby and Ted.

Title:       The Sixth Floor recalls fateful November day.
             (Dallas, Texas museum dedicated to John F.
             Kennedy)

Authors:     Fish, Peter
Citation:    Sunset, Nov 1992 v189 n5 p32B(1)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    Historical museums_Texas
             Presidents_Exhibitions
             Assassination_Exhibitions
             Dallas, Texas_Galleries and museums

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Locations:   Dallas, Texas

Reference #: A13618021

=============================================================

Abstract: The Sixth Floor is a $3.5 million museum exhibiting
          photographs, documentary films and recreated
          displays tracing John F. Kennedy's presidency and
          assassination in Texas. Located in the Dallas
          County Administration Building, it was the same
          floor from which Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly shot
          Kennedy.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Sunset Publishing Corporation 1992

IT IS AN UNSETTLING PLACE. The brick warehouse is not like
Ford's Theatre or the Tower of London or other shrines to
historic crimes. It lacks the safe distance of tragedy long
past; it retains the power to wound. After all, most people
who come here will remember where they were and what they
were doing when the building earned its notoriety.

That is why, if you're in Dallas, you'll probably feel
compelled to visit. Not for pleasure, exactly, but to see
where American life irrevocably changed. Today the brick
warehouse is called the Dallas County Administration
Building. You probably remember it as the Texas School Book
Depository. You remember that on November 22, 1963, at 12:30
P.M.--so all official, though still debated, accounts
maintain--Lee Harvey Oswald stood at a sixth-floor window and
with a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle assassinated President John
F. Kennedy.

OUT OF TRAGEDY, A MOVING MEMORIAL

In the assassination's aftermath, many Dallasites would have
liked the depository and the memories it carried erased from
their skyline. But visitors from around the world thronged to
the site, and in 1989, Dallas County acceded to their wishes,
turning the building's sixth floor into a $3.5-million museum
documenting JFK's death and legacy.

Because most actual assassination evidence remains in the
National Archives in Washington, D.C., The Sixth Floor
exhibition depends on photographs, documentary films, and
recreated displays to trace Kennedy's presidency and his
fateful Texas trip.

Next to a Teletype machine is the bulletin sent over the UPI
wire at 12:34 P.M.: "Three shots were fired at President
Kennedy's motorcade today in downtown Dallas." On a video
screen, a shaken Walter Cronkite announces, "From Dallas,
Texas--the flash apparently official--President Kennedy died
at 1 P.M."

The exhibit isn't designed to answer every objection of
conspiracy buffs. But it does present alternative theories
about the shooting. You can see the infamous landmarks for
yourself: look out the windows and there are Dealey Plaza and
the grassy knoll.

The Dallas County Administration Building is at Elm and
Houston streets. Hours are 10 to 6 Sundays through Fridays,
10 to 7 Saturdays. Admission costs $4, $2 for students 6
through 18, free for ages under 6. For more details, write or
call The Sixth Floor, 411 Elm St., Dallas 75202; (214)
653-6666.

Title:       The second coming of Jim Garrison. (motion
             picture 'JFK')

Authors:     Epstein, Edward Jay
Citation:    The Atlantic, March 1993 v271 n3 p89(5)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Subjects:    JFK (Motion picture)_Criticism, interpretation,
               etc.

People:      Stone, Oliver_Criticism, interpretation, etc.;
             Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A13279007

=============================================================

Abstract: Oliver Stone's film 'JFK' is based on a conspiracy
          developed by district attorney Jim Garrison that
          failed to stand up in court. The film further
          distorts reality by misrepresenting fiction for
          fact.

=============================================================

Full Text COPYRIGHT Atlantic Monthly Company 1993

More than a century before the advent of the Hollywood
pseudodocumentary Karl Marx suggested that all great events
and personalities in world history happen twice: "the first
time as tragedy, the second as farce." Oliver Stone's film
JFK is a case in point.

In 1969, when the conspiracy-to-kill-kennedy trial brought by
New Orleans's District Attorney Jim Garrison 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 hypnotically induced story of a single witness. This
witness Perry Raymond Russo, testified that he had had no
conscious memory of his own conspiracy story before he had
been drugged, hypnotized, and fed hypothetical circumstances
by the district attorney and his staff about the plot he was
supposed to have witnessed. To the dismay of his supporters,
this was the essence of Garrison's show trial: a witness who
acknowledged he could not, after his bizaffe treatment,
separate fantasy from reality. After that, Garrison's
meretrious prosecution of the case was considered by the
press to be, as The New York Times said in an editorial, "one
of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of American
jurisprudence." In this debacle Garrison was exposed as a man
who had recklessly disregarded the truth when it suited his
purposes.

Then, in 1991, a generation later, in the film JFK, Garrison
re-emerged phoenixlike from the debris as the truth-seeking
prosecutor (played by Kevin Costner) who brilliantly solves
the mystery of the Kennedy assassination. In this version
there is no hypnosis: Garrison resourcefully uncovers cogent
evidence that Clay Shaw, in New Orleans, participated in the
planning of the Dallas ambush of President Kennedy along with
two confederates: David William Ferrie (played by Joe Pesci),
a homosexual soldier of fortune, and Lee Harvey Oswald
(played by Gary Oldman). Garrison establishes that this trio
all worked for the CIA, and were recrulted into a conspiracy
to seize power in Washington.

Partly filmed in a grainy semidocumentary style, with
newsreels and amateur footage incorporated into it, JFK
appears to reveal the truth about the Kennedy assassination.
From the moment it was released, its director, Oliver Stone,
so passionately defended its factual accuracy that he became,
for all practical purposes, the new Garrison. What could be
more appropriate in the age of media than replacing a
crusading district attorney with a crusading filmmaker as the
symbol of the truth-finder in society? In this capacity
Oliver Stone - Garrison played out his case on television
news programs and talk shows, in magazines, and on the op-ed
pages of newspapers. He met with congressional leaders and,
as the original Garrison had done a quarter of a century
before, used his visibility to locus attention on the
possibility that the government was hiding the truth about
the Kennedy assassination. In exploiting the official
secrecy, Stone proved far more successful than his
predecessor at rousing interest in releasing the classified
files pertaining to the assassination.

Where Jim Garrison failed to build a plausible conspiracy
case against Clay Shaw, how did Oliver Stone succeed? The
answer is that whereas Garrison attempted only to coax,
intimidate, and hypnotize witnesses into providing him with
incriminating evidence, Oliver Stone fabricated for his film
the crucial evidence and witnesses that were missing in real
life@ven when this license required deliberately faisifying
reality and depicting events that never happened.

Consider, for example, the way stone fabricated Ferrie's
dramatic confession to Garrison in a hotel room only hours
before Ferrie died. In reality, and also in Jim Garrison's
account of the case, David Ferrie steadfastly maintained his
innocence, insisting that he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald
and that he had no knowledge of any plot to kill Kennedy. The
last person known to speak to Ferrie was George Lardner, of
The Washington Post, whom Ferrie met with from midnight to
4:00 a.m. on February 22, 1967. During this interview Ferrie
described Garrison's investigation as a "witch hunt." Several
hours later Ferrie died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

In JFK, Oliver Stone invents his own version of Ferrie's last
night. JFK shows Ferrie not being calmly interviewed by a
reporter in his home but being doggedly interrogated by Jim
Garrison and his colleagues in a hotel suite until he breaks
down and confesses. Ferrie names his CIA controller and, in
rapid-fire succession, admits in the film everything he
denied in real life. He acknowledges that he taught Oswaid
'everything." He then explains that not only does he know
Clay Shaw but also he is being blackmailed by him and
controlled by him. He admits that he still works for the CIA
- along with Oswald, Shaw, "the Cubans," and the "shooters"
in Dallas. He displays intimate knowledge of the conspiracy
by explaining that the shooters were recruited without being
told whose orders they were carrying out. He tells Garrison
that the plot is "too [expletive] big" to be investigated,
implying that powerful figures are behind it, and that,
because they know Ferrie is now talking, they have issued a
"death warrant" for him.

After Ferrie leaves Garrison and returns to his apartment, he
is shown being chased, held down, and murdered by a bald man
who forces pills down his throat. The murderer is shown in
other fictional scenes to be associated with Shaw, Oswald,
and the anti-Castro Cubans. When Garrison arrives at the
murder scene and finds the empty bottle of pills, he
concludes that Ferrie was murdered, which gives Ferrie's
earlier revelations to Garrison the force of a deathbed
confession. In reality the coroner ruled that Ferrie had died
from natural causes-a verdict that Garrison, as the empowered
authority, did not contest.)

Oliver Stone's transformations, as seen in the table below,
involve more than some trivial cinematic contrivances. They
provide the critical linkage for the conspiracy. Ferrie's
confession connects the team of anonymous shooters in Dallas
with Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans, and
other CIA "untouchables." It changes the entire story - just
as a story about the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
would be changed if a film fabricated a fictional scene
showing the Rosenbergs confessing to J. Edgar Hoover that
they were part of a Communist conspiracy to steal atomic
secrets.

Ferrie's false confession is not an isolated bit of license.
Throughout JFK, in dozens of scenes, Oliver Stone substitutes
fiction for fact when it advances his case. He freewheelingly
uses facts from the two books he represents as being the
bases for JFK (On the Trail of the Assassins, by Jim
Garrison, and Crossfire.- The Plot That Killed Kennedy, by
Jim Marrs). He makes especially effective use of this
substitution technique when it comes to witnesses. Here, like
all fictionalizers, he has an advantage over fact-finders: he
can artfully fashion his replacement witnesses to meet the
audience's criteria for what is credible. His substitution of
the fictional Willie O'Keefe (played by Kevin Bacon) for
Garrison's flawed witness, Perry Raymond Russo, is a case in
point.

Russo, it will be recalled, was the sole witness Garrison had
to the plot that was allegedly planned in Ferrie's apartment.
But his credibility suffered from three problems.

First, there was the memory lapse. Not until four years after
the assassination did Russo tell his incriminating story, and
then only after he had been rendered semiconscious with
sodium pentothal and instructed by a hypnotist to imagine
that he was watching an important discussion about
assassinating somebody."

Second, there were inconsistent identifications. According to
the statement from his interrogation, Russo, when shown
photographs of Shaw, said that he had seen him from afar but
had never met him. Subsequently he changed his story to say
that he met was Shaw.

Third, there was his misidentification of Oswald. Russo
claimed that the man introduced to him as "Leon Oswald" had a
beard in September of 1963 and was Ferrie's roommate. Oswald
was clean-shaven at that time, at the roommate of his wife,
Marina. (Ferrie's roommate at the time did have a beard.)

Whereas Garrison was stuck with this contradictory testimony,
Oliver Stone was not. He simply substituted Willie O'Keefe,
who had none of the real witness's deficiencies.

Unlike Russo, a heterosexual with no plausible means of
access to Shaw's secret life, O'Keefe is fashioned as a
handsome male prostitute who has been Shaw's lover and drug
partner for more than a year. Moreover, he is a fascist and a
Kennedy-hater-a political stance that might explain why he
would be privy to a discussion on a topic as sensitive as the
assassination plan. Also unlike Russo, who popped up only
after Ferrie's death, seeking publicity on local television,
O'Keefe contacts Garrison before Ferrie's death - even before
Garrison's investigation has become public - from state
prison. He is serving time for prostitution, and he offers to
cooperate with Garrison (whom he finds physically attractive)
because he has "no reason to lie" and presumably because
doing so might lead to a reduction in his prison sentence.

O'Keefe displays no memory lapses requiring drugs or
hypnosis. He voluntarily relates a coherent story: Ferrie
introduced him to Shaw in the summer of 1962, and Shaw
immediately hired him to participate in elaborate orgies with
him and Ferrie. In the course of this relationship O'Keefe
met Shaw's associates, such as Oswald, whom he has no problem
identifying as beardless, and the anti-castro Cuban
mercenaries, including the bald one who murders Ferrie. At
one late-night meeting in Ferrie's apartment, after the
Cubans depart, Ferrie, Oswald, and Shaw discuss the plan for
killing Kennedy, including the "triangulation of crossfire."

The fictional O'Keefe's story is supported by Ferrie's
fictional confession, which is then given weight by Ferrie's
fictional murder by the fictional bald Cuban introduced in
O'Keefe's story. Since Oliver Stone's audience is not
apprised of the substitutions of fiction for fact, this
cross-corroboration makes the New Orleans plot plausible.

The New Orleans Conspiracy is a relatively low-level one,
involving homosexuals, anti-Castro Cuban killers, Oswald, and
CIA employees. To link it to the central conspiracy in
Washington, D.C., Oliver Stone resorts to a deus ex machina:
a fictional Deep Throatstyle anonymous source who meets with
Garrison and Identifies himself only as "X."

X is a cynical man of militarv bearing (played by Donald
Sutherland). He meets Garrison just after Ferrie's death, on
the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. When asked by Garrison
whether he is with the CIA, X refuses to idenntify the agency
he represents but tells Garrison he is "close - closer than
you think."

After describing the Warren Commission report as "fiction," X
launches into a remarkable fifteen-minute exposition of the
assassination. He discloses that Kennedy was executed by a
device "as old as the crucifixion - a military firing squad."
It was not some low-level plot but a full-blown coup d'etat."
Its purpose was to prevent Kennedy ftom withdrawing from
Vietnam and ending the Cold War with the Soviet ttnion. Since
the military-industrial complex could not afford to lose the
business from both conflicts - "a hundred billion dollars" in
war contracts was at stake - it ordered the assassination.
The secret team of generals and officials who carried out
this coup also arranged the cover story, that framed Oswald
as the lone assassin, and they sabotaged the telephone system
in Washington after the assassination so that no news would
leak out. "Nothing was left to chance," X adds.

X explains that two weeks before Kennedy was due to arrive in
Dallas, X was ordered by his superior, "General Y," to
accompany a group of officials on a trip to the South Pole.
If he hadn't been sent away, he would have had among his
"routine duties" that of arranging "additional security" for
the President in Dallas - which would have made the
assassination impossible. When he returned and realized what
had happened, he deduced that there could have been only one
reason for Y to send him away at this critical time: to
prevent him ftom interfering with the assassination plan in
Dallas. X tells Garrison that he cannot publicly reveal these
secrets, because before he could testify he would be
"arrested and gagged and maybe sent to an institution, maybe
worse," but he urges him to "make arrests" anyhow. With the
New Orleans conspiracy now connected to the Washington
conspiracy, Garrison returns to New Orleans and arrests Clay
Shaw.

In reality Garrison never met such a source. Rather than
going to Washington, D.C., he spent the week between Ferrie's
death and Shaw's arrest filling in the lapsed memory of the
new witness, Russo. Even though the original Garrison never
met X, Oliver Stone, the new Garrison, retained X as one of
his technical advisers for JFK. This supersource, whose story
was anachronistically slipped into JFK, is based on Colonel
L. Fletcher Prouty. Before his retirement from the Air Forcc,
in January of 1964, Colonel Prouty worked in the Pentagon in
the Office of Special Operations - which provided planes and
other equipment for covert activities. In November of 1963
Prouty was sent to the South Pole, but here the similarity
between the real and the fictional X ends.

Unlike the character in the film, Prouty did not count among
his duties providing "additional security" for the
President's motorcades - according to the Secret Service,
which did have that responsibility. There is no record that
he served as a liaison with the Secret Service. In his essay
"The Anatomy of Assassination," in Uncloaking the CIA (1978),
edited by Howard Frazier, Prouty alleged that the President's
security had been withdrawn not because he had any personal
knowledge that it actually had been but simply because the
Secret Service had failed to make sure, as is required by its
"manual," that all windows on the parade route were sealed
and to post countersniper teams on the roofs. The Secret
Service also neglected, according to Prouty, to maintain the
speed of the President's car at "the usual 44 miles per
hour." In fact these procedures were not required by the
Secret Service, the CIA, or the Air Force Military Police.
And X's logic that there was a connection between his
pre-retirement trip and the events in Dallas has no apparent
basis in reality.

Aside from advising Oliver Stone, Prouty has maintained
extremely active involvements with other conspira hunters. He
has served, for example, as a consultant to Lyndon LaRouche's
far-right National Democratic Policy Committee, at a
conference of which he provided a presentation comparing the
U.S. government's prosecution of LaRouche (for conspiracy and
mail fraud) to the prosecution of Socrates; as a board member
of the Populist Action Committee, where he joined Roben
Weems, a former activist in the Ku Klux Klan, and John
Rarick, a prominent figure in the White Citizen's Council;
and as a featured speaker for the Liberty Lobby, the
anti-civil-rights organization whose founder, Willis Carto,
also set up the Institute for Historical Review, which has
disseminated books and videotapes alleging, among other
things, that the Nazi death camps in Europe were fictions
devised by Zionist propaganda to justify the donation of tax
money to Israel. (It also distributes Prouty's own book, The
Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United
States and the World".)

Prouty has exposed the machinations of putative global
conspiracies, too. For example, at the Liberty Lobby's annual
Board of Policy Convention in 1990 he presented a special
seminar, "Who Is the Enemy?" Prouty laid the blame for the
high price of oil on a cabal that had systematically plotted
to shut down oil pipelines in the Middle East. Why?" he
asked, and explained to the seminar: "Because of the
Israelis. That's their business, on behalf of the oil
companies. That's why they get $3 billion a year from the
U.S. taxpayers." His enemies list also includes the CIA,
usurers, school textbooks, the media, political parties,
banks, federal crisis-planning exercises, and the U.S.-USSR
Trade and Economic Council (which, according to Prouty,
stage-managed, along with David Rockefeller, the liquidation
of the Berlin Wall to profit from "the rubles and the gold").

This is the intellectual provenance of the man Oliver Stone
chose as one of his technical advisers - and of the man
called X. In JFK, X displays secret knowledge about the
ultimate conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination when he
tells Garrison that the "how" and the "who" of the shooting
are "just scenery" to hide the why." The "why" proceeds from
the unbreakable rule of the power elite that "the organizing
principle of any society ... is for war." Because Kennedy
violated this rule by taking steps to end the war, he had to
die.

The Secret Knowledge that Prouty/X had about the elite's
organizing principle and the war system" derives from a very
special source a study supposedly suppressed by the Kennedy
Administration, which Prouty discussed on the Liberry Lobby's
Radio Free America on December 14, 1989. He explained then
that this study was so secret that the group of power
brokers" who conducted it met "in an underground storage and
security area," called "Iron Mountain," in the Hudson Valley
of New York. The explosive issue they addressed was: Could
America survive "if and when a condition of permanent peace
should arrive"? Their conclusion, which X would echo almost
word for word in JFK two years later, was that "the
organization of a society for the possibility of war is its
principal political stabilizer"; without a believable
possibility that it would engage in war "no government can
long remain in power," and consequently "the elimination of
war ... implies the inevitable elimination of national
sovereignty." Prouty explained on the radio program and in a
subsequent issue of Spotlight, the newspaper of the Liberty
Lobby, that these conclusions came directly from the report
by the Iron Mountain group-of which he had obtained a copy
(and which the Institute for Historical Review wanted to sell
but couldn't, for copyright reasons). He concluded the
program by talking about the "high cabal ... calling the
shots."

Prouty quoted from the Report From Iron Mountain on the
Possibility anddesirability of Pe"e-and he failed to realize
that it was a complete hoax. There was no group meeting in an
underground storage vault in Iron Mountain, no study of the
elimination of the threat of war, no report from power
brokers. The Report? From Iron Mountain was a brilliant spoof
of think tanks written by the political satirist Leonard
Lewin in 1967. Victor Navasky, then the editor of the satiric
magazine Monocle, who thought up the idea, persuaded Dial
Press to put Lewin's book on its nonfiction instead of its
fiction list, a choice that resulted in a front-page news
story in The New York Times about the "suppressed" report.
Subsequently it was revealed by the author for what it was.
What neither the author nor Navasky could foresee was that
this hoax would re-emerge a quarter of a century later, first
in radical-right radio broadcasts and Liberty Lobby
publications, and then as the connective logic of Oliver
Stone's film.

Not only did Prouty prove unable to distinguish a mirthful
hoax from somber reality but Stone himself proved unable to
separate the false scenes in JFK from the reality of
Garrison's case. At a Town Hall meeting in New York in March
of last year he again compared himself to Gaffison, saying
that they were two of four people libeled by the media for
representing an "unofficial history" of the assassination
(the other two in this quartet are, according to Stone,
Oswald and President Kennedy). The panel at Town Hall
included Norman Mailer, Nora Ephron, and me, and it was
moderated by Victor Navasky, now the editor of The Nation.
When I pointed out to Stone that his depiction of Ferrie's
confession to Garrison was false history, he replied that
even though such a meeting never happened, he had "sketched"
it into Ferrie's last night because Feffie was at an eartier
point "raving and ranting' to one of Garrison's
investigators. Stone saw no problem in having misrepresented
fiction as fact in this way in his unofficial history." A
series of seven fictitious scenes in the filrh depicted
someone pasting Oswald's head on a photograph of another
gunman's body in order to frame Oswald; to a person who
questioned this fiction by meticulously citing the actual
photographic evidence, Stone responded, 'I don't know where
you get your facts." Moreover, he later not only vouched for
the bona fides of Proury but also presented as pure truth X's
thesis that the "military-industrial complex" killed Kennedy
so that he would not end the war in Vietnam.

Oliver Stone demonstrates yet again how easily pierced is the
thin membrane that separates the mainstream media from the
festering pools of fantasy on their periphery. What he
allowed to ooze into JFK from these fringes, with the help of
his technical adviser, is the tormenting concept that 'secret
teams' and "high cabals" fabricated entire historic events to
fool Stone, Prouty, and us - a concept that incorporates into
its schema even the Iron Mountain hoax. In doing so, Oliver
Stone organized a flight from reality. JFK thus completcs the
journey from fact to fantasy that began with the flawed
Warren Commission report in 1964. What has been lost en route
is the truth. [TABULAR DATA OMITTED]

Title:       Marina's story. (widow of Lee Harvey Oswald)

Authors:     Casey, Kathryn
Citation:    Ladies Home Journal, May 1993 v110 n5 p156(3)

-------------------------------------------------------------

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination;  Oswald, Lee
             Harvey_Investigations

Reference #: A13618660

=============================================================

Abstract: Marina Oswald visited the Texas Book Depository and
          Dealey Plaza in Dallas, TX, thirty years after Pres
          John F. Kennedy was assassinated. She maintains
          that her husband was simply a pawn of a conspiracy
          and is not guilty of the assassination.

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Full Text COPYRIGHT Meredith Corporation 1993

For the first time ever, the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald has
come to the places that have haunted her for the past thirty
years: the Texas School Book Depository and Dealey Plaza,
where President John E Kennedy was killed on November 22,
1963. "Sooner or later you have to face something; you have
to conquer it," she says shakily. "I wanted to come here."
Marina peers nervously out a window on the sixth floor of the
book depository - the very bank of windows from which her
husband allegedly fired. "I hate to look," she says, her
voice still thick with the accent of her native Russia, as
she surveys Dealey Plaza and the path of Kennedy's motorcade.
"If only these walls could talk. It would take a miracle for
someone to tell what really happened."

For many years, Marina, too, kept silent. It wasn't until
1988, in an exclusive interview with Ladies' Home Journal,
that she first spoke publicly about the pain of being a
twenty-two-year-old mother, a foreigner in a strange country
and the widow of the most infamous man in America. She also
revealed that although she once believed that her husband was
guilty, she had grown to doubt the Warren Commission findings
that branded Oswald the lone gunman.

The article caught the eye of Hollywood producers, and later
this year, NBC will air a movie of Marina's story starring
Helena Bonham Carter, of A Room with a View and Howards End.

Haunted by the past

Marina met Lee Harvey Oswald, a high school dropout and an
ex-Marine who had applied - but been turned down - for Soviet
citizenship, in the city of Minsk, where he was working. They
were married, and in 1962, Oswald brought his young wife to
America. Marina remembers being very much in love with her
husband. "Yes, I loved him," she says. "They ask me, ~How can
you love an assassin?' I didn't fall in love with the
assassin, I fell in love with the man." And it was Oswald the
man she grieved for when, just two days after Kennedy's
assassination, he was gunned down by Dallas nightclub owner
Jack Ruby.

Although Marina, fifty-four, remarried twenty-seven years
ago, raised three children and is the grandmother of five,
she admits that day in Dallas never left her. She sometimes
has flashbacks, usually of walking in slow motion through a
crush of reporters shouting questions in o language she can't
understand. For many years, she accepted the role of widow of
the assassin, but it cost her dearly. "I'm all crumbled
inside," she says, explaining how the disgrace ate away at
her. "Lee was buried, but I was [buried] even deeper by [the
weight of my] humiliation."

But in 1978, after Congress reopened the investigation into
Kennedy's death, Marina began reevaluating the evidence,
studying books and movies on the assassination. "It has been
like a heavy object, a hammer in my mind," she says. Perhaps
buoyed by projects like Oliver Stone's movie JFK and the new
interest it spawned in a possible conspiracy, Marina now
maintains: "Lee never fired a shot. He was a patsy."
Narrowing her haunted blue eyes, she concludes, "It was a
political assassination. Very professionally done."

The fact that her husband was shot only strengthens her
belief. "If he were guilty, he'd still be alive," she says.
"There would have been no need to kill him, to shut him up."

Pointing out of one of the sixth-floor windows at the alleged
path of Oswald's shots, Marina scoffs, "Let intelligent
people come and judge for themselves. I'm not an expert, but
it's obvious to me [that it is impossible]."

Though the sixth floor has been open to the public as a
museum since 1989, this is Marina's first visit, and she has
been dreading it. Everywhere, images of the post surround
her: Jack and Jackie Kennedy on their wedding day; a vibrant
Kennedy taking the oath of office; Jackie, her smart pink
suit bloodied, crawling back over the trunk of the
presidential limousine; John-John saluting his father's
casket. These reminders both frustrate and obsess her. "I
don't want to live in the past," Marina says. "I want to live
right now, but it's not in my power."

As she talks, a black-and-white video plays. In it, Oswald,
guarded by police escort, is led down a long hall while
reporters shout questions. A narrator says, "In Dallas, Lee
Harvey Oswald has been arrested for the assassination of
President Kennedy." Marina stares resolutely out the window.
If she hears, she doesn't react.

A need to speak

Voicing her beliefs - and opening herself up to criticism -
has been difficult for Marina. "You don't know how many times
I talk to myself, "Why am I doing this?'" she says, shaking
her head. "Sometimes I want to throw in the towel." It has
been painful for her family, too. Marina admits her children
(June, thirty-one, and Rachel, twenty-nine, by Oswald, and
son Mark, twenty-seven, by her second husband, Kenneth
Porter, a carpenter) are not happy with her decision to allow
the TV movie to be produced. "I think they want to be left
alone," she says. "It's their right."

Despite the pain, Marina says she is compelled to tell others
what she believes. "You try to put things behind and go on
with your life, but it's on television, in the papers. Lee
Harvey Oswald - assassin. It just slaps me in the face," she
whispers. "I have the opportunity to put on record my beliefs
. . . that is the best I can do."

Understandably, Marina's relationship with America, her
adopted country, has been uncomfortable. "For many years, I
felt I loved this country; this country did not love me," she
says. Although she's lived in the U.S. for nearly thirty-two
years, she become a citizen only three years ago, when she
wanted to travel as an American while accompanying filmmakers
who were shooting part of her story in Russia.

Her pilgrimage to her native country was on emotional
experience. She says she felt like a stranger in her
homeland. "When I flew back to Dallas, I knew I belonged
here," she says. "I love America with all my heart."

In Dallas, Marina is still something of a curiosity. From the
beginning she was approached by strangers eager to voice
their opinions. For years she'd draw away, afraid of what
they might say. These days, they often shore her view that
there is much Americans still don't know about who killed JFK
and why. "One woman came up to me and said, ~Honey, your
husband didn't do it,' "Marina says, smiling. "I wanted to
run after her, to ask, ~What do you know? On what grounds do
you base that?'"

Unless someone is able to prove to her satisfaction that
Oswald fired the shot that killed Kennedy, Marina says she'll
continue to believe her husband's story is a historic
miscarriage of justice. "I would like in my lifetime that the
name Lee Harvey Oswald not be something ugly and dirty," she
says.

And if she's wrong about her husband's innocence? "Even if
Lee is guilty, I'm not responsible," she says with newfound
understanding. "I'm not going to live with guilt for the rest
of my life. I am entitled to life. I want to have hope."

Title:       What might have been. (John F. Kennedy
             assassination) (excerpt from 'History's Shadow')

Authors:     Connally, John B.
Citation:    Time, June 28, 1993 v141 n26 p44(2)

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Subjects:    Governors_Biography
             History's Shadow (Book)_Excerpts

People:      Kennedy, John F._Assassination

Reference #: A13968848

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Abstract: Former Governor John Connally of Texas believed
          that John F. Kennedy would have served a second
          term if he had not been assassinated. Among other
          results, this could have changed the course of the
          Vietnam War. The events of Nov 22, 1993 are
          described.

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Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1993

John Connally played out his life on the national stage, but
never quite in the center spotlight. He helped elect
Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, yet saw his own presidential
ambitions fizzle. Last week Democrats and Republicans alike
gathered in Austin, Texas, to mourn the passing of Connally,
who was dead at 76. A three-term Texas Governor and Democrat
turned Republican who served as Richard Nixon's Treasury
Secretary, Connally nonetheless will be best remembered as
the man who sat in front of John Kennedy in a Dallas
motorcade on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963. As burial
preparations were under way, FBI officials sought permission
from the Connally family to extract fragments of the bullet
that tore through Connally's chest that bleak November day.
Their aim was to settle once and for all the perennial
question of whether Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in
Dallas. Instead, the request only unsettled Connally's kin.
"It's an appalling attempt to capitalize on Governor
Connally's death to gain publicity for worn-out theories,"
said Julian Read, a family spokesman.

Shortly before he died, Connally finished his memoirs, In
History's Shadow. In the following excerpts from the book, he
ponders the what ifs and what might have beens.

If nothing else, I have become an expert on fate, possibly
bad judgment, too.

I helped elect three Presidents, watched from inches away the
murder of one of them, experienced the bloody madness of war,
lost a beloved daughter, was tried and acquitted on a
criminal charge, went broke, watched my wife Nellie defeat
breast cancer, and endured. I have witnessed more history
than any school can teach.

But I have kept a secret from the public at large. That John
Connally changed forever on Nov. 22, 1963.

In the weeks after the assassination, the weeks spent in
Parkland Hospital, my temperament changed. John Kennedy's
death gave me a different perspective on life, its frailties
and its meaning. It made me impatient with trivia and egos
and self-aggrandizement. The fires of ambition had been
considerably banked by the tragedy. Not out of personal fear
but out of a new awareness, I no longer had any irresistible
desire to subject myself or my family to a continuing
political career. Today I have no regrets that there was
never a President Connally.

It is a sad but compelling assignment to imagine how the
world would be today if John Fitzgerald Kennedy had lived.
Would the world be vastly different? Different, yes, but
perhaps not vastly so. The world, I feel sure, would still be
as dangerous and unstable a place.

I don't doubt for a moment that Kennedy would have been
re-elected in 1964. The major changes would have been in the
management of the Vietnam War and the presidential
succession. If Kennedy had lived, Lyndon Johnson would have
run again in the second spot on the ticket, and he would
never have been elected President. By 1968, his health and
age -- and the diminishing effect of eight years as Vice
President -- would have eliminated him.

The intriguing question relates to Robert Kennedy. He could
have been nominated to succeed his brother and would have
been elected. But while this country may lust after royalty
and might not have been troubled by the idea of a dynasty, I
believe Bobby Kennedy might have been. I think he would have
wisely resisted the kind of rock stardom that was building
around the brothers. He could easily have waited four years
or eight.

My guess is that Jack Kennedy would have withdrawn American
troops from Vietnam shortly into his second term. Although he
did hesitate to raise the ante, he was less charmed by the
generals than Johnson and less susceptible to their
pressures. I believe he had already concluded that the war
was unwinnable and had found his pitch: we wanted to help,
but in the end the sons of South Vietnam had to fight for
their own country.

If Kennedy had lived, I assume my own attitude would not have
changed, and it is conceivable I might have presumed to run
for President myself in 1968. My political ambitions would
almost certainly have taken on more steam. If not the
presi