JFK - six seconds in Dallas, three hours of stretching the truth

A FEW weeks ago, I was in a pub and overheard a couple of drinkers debating over who exactly was responsible for events at Dealy Plaza.
"You can't rule the Cubans out, the exiles hated the Kennedys," claimed one. "True, but the mafia could have had a hand in it too. Robert Kennedy was determined to bring all the mob bosses down," claimed the other.

And then it happened.
"One thing we do know is that Oswald never acted alone. It's in JFK."
To say Oliver Stone's 1991 account of the events leading up to the Kennedy assassination and the chaos that followed was economical with the truth would be a gross understatement.
But once the power of celluloid has entered the social mindset, it's very difficult to convince people to see the clear difference between fact and fiction.
Based on New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's book 'On the Trail of the Assassins' it's not hard to see how the film came in for heavy criticism even months before it was released.
In 1967, Garrison became the first and to date, only prosecutor to bring a case to trial in the Kennedy murder.

Portrayed in the film by Kevin Costner as a barrister who'll stop at nothing to uncover the brutal truth of a government cover up at the highest level, Garrison's case was widely attacked at the time as being flimsy at best.
His star witness was Perry Russo, who claimed he had seen Lee Harvey Oswald at a party talking about a possible assassination attempt with Clay Shaw, a prominent businessman and the man standing trial for the murder. Shaw had denied ever meetnig Oswald.
But the case fell apart when it turned out Russo had seen nothing of the sort and had in fact been telling a pack of lies, a fact conveniently overlooked in the film.
It would appear the movie blatantly attempted to overturn events and opinions in history with Clay Shaw being the guilty murderer but being far too powerful to be convicted while the heroic and defiant Garrison, after delivering his 'Never forget your dying king' speech in the courtroom (which was completely fictitious) vowed to never give up in his pursuit of Shaw.
Although Shaw (played in the film by Tommy Lee Jones) had denied at the trial of any CIA involvement, former director Richard Helms admitted years later that Shaw did have a low key role within the Agency for providing information from foreign land, as did 150,000 other travelling American businessmen by the late 1970s.
Tenuous at best, but Stone went into overdrive with some of the so called facts in the film and completely turned them round to beef up the consipracy theory.
It was claimed that Oswald (Gary Oldman) had been a poor marksman during his time in the Marines, thus making it highly unlikely he would have been able to carry off the murder alone with such precision shooting from a sixth floor window.
Completely untrue. Oswald was a highly skilled marskman, as was proved by his Marine records.

Incidentally, Oswald's brother has always maintained that he has no doubt over LHO's involvement in the murder and vehemently claims that he had acted alone.
But what about the film of the murder shot by Abraham Zapruder, clearly showing Kennedy's head being violently thrown back and to the left, strongly indicating that a rifleman was postitioned behind the infamous grassy knoll and thus proving a conspiracy?
For many, this was proof beyond doubt when it was given its first public showing at the Shaw trial but experts have since claimed that the trajectory of the bullet could have thrown Kennedy's head backwards, even if he was being shot at from behind.
With the CIA, FBI, ONI, the Cubans and the Mafia strongly implicated in the film, Stone goes on to reiterate Garrison's radical claims that incoming president Lyndon B.Johnson was heavily involved behind the scenes to have Kennedy removed from office.
Could that really have happened? Could the then vice president really have conspired to have the President of the United States murdered in broad daylight?
There's plenty more supposed damning evidence in the film presented as fact which simply wasn't the case. The pictures of LHO in his back yard posing with the rifles being doctored by experts? Apparently not, they were later shown to be genuine.
Plus the myriad of conversations that took place in the film that there's no record of actually occurring.
It's been 45 years since the murder took place but the world at large is no closer to knowing the truth than it was in November 1963.
Was LHO what he said he was, a patsy? Was there really a massive government plot to have Kennedy eliminated or is it no surprise that to this day, not a single scrap of conspiracy evidence has been proven as fact?
Did Garrison really uncover the truth about Shaw or was he really just a man obsessed with attention?
Get yourselves down the pub, order a pint, and get the ball rolling.

• Post to:
•  del.icio.us
•  Digg
•  Newsvine
•  Nowpublic
•  Reddit