X Close

Oliver Stone’s seductive conspiracies The director's JFK obsession was initially enticing

The crime that marked the end of America’s innocence (Getty)


November 29, 2021   8 mins

In the spring of 1991, George Lardner Jr, the Washington Post’s national security correspondent, received a leaked draft of the screenplay for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. Intrigued, he visited the set in Dallas, where he was told that Kevin Costner, who was starring as New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, had told him flatly: “Nobody in America believes Oswald did it.”

Costner was exaggerating but not by much. Around that time, 77% of Americans told pollsters that they believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was not solely responsible for the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Phrases from the case had long ago entered the national vocabulary: magic bullet, lone gunman, Zapruder film, grassy knoll, patsy.

Stone’s movie did not actually do much to shift the numbers. What it did do, in generating $205m, eight Oscar nominations and an almighty debate, was introduce a mainstream audience to the mindset of conspiracy theories: the obsessive accumulation of data, wild deductive leaps and spinning of yarns.

I know because I was one of them. JFK was my gateway drug into the thrillingly murky world of post-war dirty tricks and black ops, where I was often unable to distinguish between actual conspiracies such as Watergate and MK-ULTRA and fanciful speculation. As a reformed conspiracy theorist, I’m familiar with the seductive power of that adventure into an underworld where there are no coincidences, only connections. “My eyes have opened,” says Costner’s Garrison, “and once they’re open, believe me, what used to look normal seems insane.” And vice versa, of course.

JFK coloured a decade which, though remembered as relatively stable, was riddled with paranoia, from The X-Files to the fantastical Right-wing conspiracy theories swirling around the Clintons. Yet today, as Stone releases a 30th anniversary documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, JFK’s legacy is even more complicated.

Christopher Hitchens wrote that “modern American conspiracy theory begins with the Warren Commission”. In fact, the first counter-narrative was published within a month of the assassination. An article in the National Guardian by Mark Lane, a young lawyer hired by Oswald’s mother, caused a sensation in the UK as well as the US. Worthies including Labour MP Michael Foot, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper promptly formed the Who Killed Kennedy Committee.

The Warren Commission, under pressure to reach a unanimous conclusion before the 1964 election, left many inconsistencies unaddressed and alternative perpetrators unexplored; ironically, its critics largely relied on the commission’s own published evidence, which ran to 27 volumes and 10.4 million words. Two years later, when Lane’s massive bestseller Rush to Judgment led a pack of anti-Warren books including Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash and Richard H Popkin’s The Second Oswald, half of Americans said that they disbelieved the commission’s lone-gunman theory.

Lane’s theories later inspired the 1973 movie Executive Action, a weirdly boring dramatisation of a hypothetical plot to kill Kennedy. By then, an an assassination completist would have amassed around 2,000 volumes of speculation about the accuracy of Carcano model 91 rifles, doppelganger Oswalds, Cuban exiles, mobsters and spooks. It was already, as Stone says in JFK Revisited, “the most thoroughly documented crime in American history”. By 1979, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that there was probably a conspiracy and (based on later discredited acoustical evidence) probably a fourth shot from the grassy knoll, Kennedy conspiracy theories were thoroughly mainstream. “Next thing you know they’ll be blaming World War II on Hitler,” joked talk-show host Johnny Carson.

The 25th anniversary of the assassination, 1988, was a busy year. Don DeLillo, American literature’s great scholar of conspiracy and paranoia, fictionalised the story of Oswald and “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” in his bestselling novel Libra. In the UK, ITV broadcast The Men Who Killed Kennedy, a two-part documentary so tenuous that director Nigel Turner was censured by regulators.

This was also the year that Stone met a publisher and former Garrison staffer named Ellen Ray, who gave him a copy of Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins. Until then, Stone told Esquire, “I thought that people like Mark Lane were crazy. I thought Lee Oswald had shot the president.” No longer. After giving Garrison a three-hour grilling, he optioned the book and plunged down the rabbit hole.

Garrison, as fans of the film will know, is still the only person to bring a criminal prosecution in relation to Kennedy’s murder, identifying a CIA-connected New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw as a key conspirator. He failed. Newsweek called the 1969 trial “a merry kind of parody of conspiracy theories, a can-you-top-this of arbitrarily conjoined improbabilities”. Yet this patriotic military veteran who came to believe that his country had been betrayed at the highest level was to Stone the ideal protagonist for an “outlaw history or counter-myth” about the crime that marked the end of America’s innocence.

That’s why Stone cast the Republican Costner as an all-American truth-seeker in the mould of James Stewart or Gary Cooper and commissioned a John Williams score that sounded like a Fourth of July parade passing through a horror movie. A Vietnam veteran, Stone believed that Kennedy would have averted the conflict, broken up the CIA and ended the Cold War, thus making the assassination nothing less than a coup d’etat. As Costner says in the movie: “The ghost of John F Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder at the heart of the American dream.”

Stone wanted to tell the story not just of Garrison’s investigation but of Oswald, Dealey Plaza and military escalation in Vietnam, to which end his research team consulted around 200 books of assassination lore. He pitched JFK to Warner Brothers’s Terry Semel (who had produced All the President’s Men and The Parallax View) as a Rashomon-style tapestry of conflicting perspectives rather than a coherent thesis. But that’s not the film he made.

In purely cinematic terms, JFK is a masterpiece of casting, editing, cinematography and storytelling. For a film which runs to 188 minutes (206 in the director’s cut currently available on Amazon Prime) and consists mostly of not just dialogue but lectures, it is both comprehensible and exhilaratingly watchable: part pseudo-documentary, part star-studded paranoid thriller. The ultimate effect is overwhelming, phantasmagorical, a bad dream.

Roger Ebert, a Warren sceptic and bullish supporter of the movie, argued that this eerie mood made JFK’s myriad historical inaccuracies and fabrications beside the point. “I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares,” he wrote in a retrospective piece. “As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for fact.”

But did Stone agree? There are gestures towards ambiguity in JFK — Costner’s Garrison often signposts a theory with “Let’s suppose”, “My guess is” or “What if” — but we are obviously meant to believe that he is on the right track. “My own conclusions go harder and further than the film,” Stone admitted to Ebert.

Elsewhere, the director insisted: “We clearly differentiate between fact and theory in the film. Any person familiar with film techniques knows that when we cut to something like [Jack] Ruby picking up the bullet in the hospital in black and white, it’s a hypothetical image.” But this is disingenuous. Even if you assume that the average cinema-goer is au fait with the semiotics of film stock, JFK is too sense-alteringly fast and dense for cool-headed scrutiny. And some realistic-looking scenes, such as the manic hotel-room confession of Joe Pesci’s David Ferrie, are completely imagined. Compare it to David Fincher’s Zodiac, which evokes obsession and paranoia without cooking the historical books or pretending that its hero is not somewhat of a crank.

Still, it is hard not to feel sorry for Stone over the backlash against JFK, which began with Lardner’s article two months before the movie had finished shooting and rolled on throughout 1991. He was attacked in almost every major newspaper and magazine, and mocked on Saturday Night Live. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association, went so far as to compare him to Leni Riefenstahl. “Saddam Hussein did not receive half the vituperation the op-ed crowd has aimed at JFK,” Ebert protested.

Stone went on the counterattack, firing off a fusillade of angry letters to publications to defend his movie’s veracity, all of which were reprinted in JFK: The Book of the Film, a heavily annotated screenplay followed by 400 pages of press clippings. One recipient, the New York Times veteran Tom Wicker, had a pithy response: “The director of JFK is not, as he claims, an artist. He is a polemicist.”

I’d suggest he is (or was) both. Let’s suppose, in Garrisonian style, that just as conspiracy theorists claim there were two Lee Harvey Oswalds, there were two Oliver Stones: the artist who made the movie and the polemicist who defended it. My guess is that what seemed like a concerted effort to pre-emptively discredit JFK led him to identify too strongly with Garrison, a man of “lone-wolf integrity” who was “accused, pandered, ridiculed and humiliated”. So he doubled down on the movie’s claims and rejected the licence of fiction. He has been stuck in that defensive posture ever since. “There’s nothing in the movie that I would go back on,” he said in 2013.

With the release of JFK Revisited, the polemicist has decisively defeated the artist. More like the book of the film than the film itself, this investigative essay is earnestly insistent on backing up JFK’s claims with evidence declassified since 1991. “Conspiracy theory,” Stone declares, “has become conspiracy fact”. He promises to “piece together what really happened that day”.

Those are bold statements. In a way, JFK succeeded too well. As Stone had hoped, it led the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board, which has since released almost every piece of evidence gathered by the Warren Commission and the HSC; the process is due to conclude by December 2022. Yet to this day the only smoking gun is Oswald’s Mannlicher. There have been no decisive revelations, no incriminating leaks, no deathbed confessions to wrap things up. On the contrary, books such as Gerald Posner’s Case Closed and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History have methodically debunked many of the claims in JFK.

And so JFK Revisited feels like an old rock band on tour, mixing classic hits with underwhelming new material. Minus the artistry and stardust of the first movie, it resembles a high-end version of one of those YouTube documentaries which promises to tell you the truth about 9/11 or Covid-19. The assassination buffs interviewed by Stone are still effectively in the same position they occupied in 1966: capable of casting enormous doubt on the Warren Commission’s flawed account but unable to replace it with a convincing narrative of their own. They remind me of the researcher in Libra: “He knows he can’t get out. This case will haunt him to the end.” No wonder that the percentage of Americans who believe in a conspiracy has slipped from a high of 81% in 2001 to 61% now, or that the last major film about the assassination, Jackie, concentrated on grief rather than guilt. A theory cannot thrive on scraps forever.

But there is a darker context. Rewatching JFK made me nostalgic for a time when conspiracy theories seemed titillating, exotic and largely well-intentioned. These days, Stone’s once-reasonable request that viewers do their own research is the mantra of every crank. The anti-imperialist Left and authoritarian Right come together to smear the White Helmets and deny President Assad’s use of chemical weapons (Stone himself has praised Putin as a “stabilising force” in Syria). Donald Trump convinces tens of millions of his followers that the last election was stolen. A pandemic breeds theories about a “plandemic”. Alex Jones is sued for claiming that the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax and the grieving families and survivors merely “crisis actors”. On and on. This mindset has poisoned the world.

The Kennedys are infected, too. Last month, QAnon believers gathered in Dallas to await the return of John F Kennedy Jr to become Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate. (Generally believed to have died in 1999, he did not show up.) Robert F Kennedy Jr, who appears in JFK Revisited, is America’s most influential anti-vaxxer.

“Conspiracy theory thus becomes an ailment of democracy,” Christopher Hitchens wrote sympathetically in 1991. “It is the white noise which moves in to fill the vacuity of the official version.” But we can see now that conspiracy theories spring up even when the official version is much more solid than the Warren report. Which authority is to blame for the obscene fantasies of Alex Jones? What space are QAnon or Pizzagate moving into except a zone of epistemological chaos — the ruins of our shared reality?

Thirty years on, it is clear that JFK is not remotely a good movie about the assassination but it is a peerless dramatisation of how it feels to be a conspiracy theorist. Perhaps that makes it more valuable than ever.


Dorian Lynskey is an author, journalist and UnHerd columnist.

Dorianlynskey

Join the discussion


Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber


To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.

Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.

Subscribe
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

38 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago

Interesting to see this article written in a time that people previously not remotely interested in speculation and ‘conspiracy theory’ have been forced to acknowledge the fact that many ‘conspiracy theories’ are true. For goodness sake, we have seen censored ‘conspiracy theory’ turn to fact in less than 18 months. Why don’t we just call them ‘theories’.

Jonathan Weil
Jonathan Weil
2 years ago

I think it’s also striking, and surely indicative of something, that “conspiracy theory” now routinely gets abbreviated to just “conspiracy”, especially in America.

Last edited 2 years ago by Jonathan Weil
Rod McLaughlin
Rod McLaughlin
2 years ago

The term “conspiracy theory” is used to amalgamate any theory about a conspiracy with the most ludicrous ones. There are valid theories about conspiracies. There are ridiculous theories. There are pseudo theories, which are theories which cannot possibly be falsified. I think “9/11 was an inside job” is a pseudotheory. Let’s leave the term “conspiracy theory” for actual theories, no matter how daft.

Christopher Hilton
Christopher Hilton
2 years ago

I’ve never understood why the JFK assassination can still be considered a conspiracy theory. The Zapruder film clearly shows that Kennedy was shot from the front: therefore Oswald could not possibly have been responsible. Most of the millions of pages of discussion since have conveniently ignored this. Black is white, day is night, two plus two equals five…

Mikey Mike
Mikey Mike
2 years ago

…and nothing will ever convince you to amend that position. Welcome to conspiracy land, where you never have to admit you’re full of s***.

Christopher Hilton
Christopher Hilton
2 years ago
Reply to  Mikey Mike

Watch the Zapruder film. You will realise it is you who is the brainwashed sheep person.

Last edited 2 years ago by Christopher Hilton
Karl Schuldes
Karl Schuldes
2 years ago

100% of the physical evidence shows he was shot from the back. What the film looks like to you is without value. It looks like the sun revolves around the earth.

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago

I saw a TV doc a few years ago that surmised that a bodyguard at the front of the car, on hearing the first shot ring out, spun around and accidentally fired off a shot from his handgun. I can’t recall whether the suggestion was that the handgun’s safety catch was mistakenly ‘off’ and whether the bodyguard was riding the running board off the driver’s side at the time.
Moreover, and whether the only ‘conspiracy’ was a cover-up to hide an almighty embarrassment. If such a shot had indeed been fired, then that would explain the fatal second shot appearing to come from the front of the President’s limousine (based on the Zapruder film).

Andy Griffiths
Andy Griffiths
2 years ago

Except the Zapruder film doesn’t clearly show Kennedy shot from the front, or else there wouldn’t be conspiracy theorists now claiming said film is a forgery… Which is kind of hilarious when you consider Stone hung JFK on ‘back and to the left’

Franz Von Peppercorn
Franz Von Peppercorn
2 years ago

No the exit of the bullet is what caused the president’s head to snap back.

Last edited 2 years ago by Franz Von Peppercorn
William Murphy
William Murphy
2 years ago

Does anyone proof read these articles? Can someone rewrite the second sentence of the first para so that it makes sense? Did Kevin Costner voice his opinion to some unnamed person apart from George Lardner?

Last edited 2 years ago by William Murphy
David Batlle
David Batlle
2 years ago

What’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and the news. About six months.

David Simpson
David Simpson
2 years ago
Reply to  David Batlle

Actually, about 18 months for those in the slow lane

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago

“introduce a mainstream audience to the mindset of conspiracy theories: the obsessive accumulation of data, wild deductive leaps and spinning of yarns.
I know because I was one of them.”

How can any sane person nor believe in ‘conspiracy theories’? At least the one where the Global Elites are out to finally take over the world in a modern kind of Feudalism? Its like not believing in electricity, or the earth circles the sun – it is just so obvious. Do Klaus Schwab and Soros have to send you e-mails saying ‘We Really are out to own the world, and all you little people.’ for you to see that?

“A pandemic breeds theories about a “plandemic””

Come on, surely everyone can see that is true……

Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
2 years ago

Terrific film, but not as good as The Parallax View.

Linda Hutchinson
Linda Hutchinson
2 years ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

I agree, loved the film. Never took it seriously, though.

Dan Gleeballs
Dan Gleeballs
2 years ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

Well, if we’re comparing, I thought Cool Hand Luke and Rollerball were pretty good.

Andy Griffiths
Andy Griffiths
2 years ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

It is a great film, although complete nonsense in historical terms.

William Hickey
William Hickey
2 years ago

The real conspiracy was the one the media concocted: to scapegoat the “right wing hate” of the city of Dallas as the “real” culprit, and not the Marxist defector to the Soviet Union.

Wasn’t the last time they did it, either.

Christopher May
Christopher May
2 years ago

I too devoured numerous books and bought into to conspiracy and then a number of things happened.
1) A friend handled JFK’s NYC campaign and told me he left his office in shock 11/22/63 and had his driver take him home. They listened to the radio and the driver headed to his own home in the opposite direction – and neither realized.
Rational behavior took a pause that day!!

2) Oswald killed Officer Tippet (sp?) – why??

3) if there was a conspiracy, they overlooked the getaway car (and probable execution of Oswald).

There are many questions about the assassination – the magic bullet rings loudest IMO – but unlike a detective novel, real life often leaves dangling threads.

Ocram’s razor cries out

William Murphy
William Murphy
2 years ago

There was a BBC documentary years ago who examined the trajectory of the “magic bullet”, so derided in the movie JFK and elsrwhere. Their explanation of the apparently “bizarre” behaviour of the bullet was that the ballistics experts had simply failed to take account of the different levels of seating where the wounded people were sitting.

I must admit that such a possibility had never occurred to me. Any car with three rows of seats which I have entered has its second and third rows on the same level. Anyone care to comment?

Karl Schuldes
Karl Schuldes
2 years ago
Reply to  William Murphy

You are correct. Three-dimensional computer reconstructions, along with medical evidence, have shown that not only was a single bullet possible, but it is the best possible explanation, and that it came from the back. Every piece of “evidence” of a second shooter has been demolished. We are stuck with the fact that a sizable segment of humanity has a psychological need for conspiracies.

Christopher Hilton
Christopher Hilton
2 years ago
Reply to  Karl Schuldes

“have shown that not only was a single bullet possible, but it is the best possible explanation, and that it came from the back.”
The bullet came from the back and miraculously threw his head in the opposite direction.
Government sheeple!

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago

The bullet came from the back and miraculously threw his head in the opposite direction.

Cars have both seatbelts and headrests for a reason. When you collide with something frontally you’re thrown initially forward, then you rebound and your head hits the headrest.
Same thing with Kennedy – his head was thrown forward and then rebounded.
It’s also clearly an exit wound to the front of his head.

Last edited 2 years ago by Jon Redman
Mikey Mike
Mikey Mike
2 years ago

the fantastical Right-wing conspiracy theories swirling around the Clintons

I don’t mean to ruin the party but the claim that conservative criticism of Clinton crimes – prosecuted or not – constitutes a weakness for conspiracy theories is itself a conspiracy theory. The piece would have been much better without that weird inclusion. Anyway, which right-wing conspiracy theories are you talking about? Whitewater? The rape of Juanita Broadrick and Eileen Wellstone?

It seems like strange non sequiturs like yours, Mr. Author, are appearing in more and more articles.
Anyway, it’s marvelous how the article about the lunacy of conspiracy theorists and theories has a comments section where people are freely admitting to their devotion to conspiracy theories. Even above-average humans aren’t especially trustworthy or reliable.

Last edited 2 years ago by Mikey Mike
Julie Kemp
Julie Kemp
2 years ago

I think this is an excellent article because it astutely points to the psychological format of our riven global Human populace. However i am with Mr Stone in regard to not believing the authorities ‘all the way’ in every case. There has been an enormous glut of foul plays in every social sector across the globe – more subtle in some areas, loudest in others. I really liked Mr Lynskey’s use of the phrase which says that “Conspiracy thus becomes an ailment of democracy.” I think that has always been a true or relevant statement about any Human era. I remain though an admirer of Mr Stone’s work and hold that there had to be figures up and down the scale of operations that effected the abhorrent murder of one flawed but kind, earnest man.

Colin Quinsey
Colin Quinsey
2 years ago

A hollow attack against the legitimate idea of conspiracy.

Franz Von Peppercorn
Franz Von Peppercorn
2 years ago

Interesting shoe horning of the white helmets in there.

David Simpson
David Simpson
2 years ago

The great thing about JFK’s assassination is a) how does anyone explain LHO’s motives (if we accept the lone killer theory) and b) how many groups had good reasons for wanting to off him – the mafia, the CIA, the Cubans, Jackie herself. We’ll never know, and there’s the fascination

David Kwavnick
David Kwavnick
2 years ago

JFK was killed because he welched on a big debt to the Mafia. Nobody, not even the President, gets away with that. The Chicago underworld got him elected by stuffing the ballot boxes in and around Chicago. That’s how he carried Illinois and the Illinois electoral votes got him elected.There were some polls in Chicago where JFK got more votes than there were registered voters in the poll. The Mafia’s price was the overthrow of the Castro government in Cuba. So, one of the first things he does after the election is to organize an invasion by cuban exiles. We all know how that ended. I won’t go into details of what happened next, but JFK promised them that the Marines would be sent into Cuba in the summer of 1964 to re-assure his re-election bid. The Mafia can be very patient, they were willing to wait. But then comes the Cuban missile crisis and part of the price of settling is a promise not to invade Cuba. (Were the missiles put there primarily to extract that promise?) Anyway, it was now clear that JFK was not going to pay his debt to the Mafia. So . . .

David Simpson
David Simpson
2 years ago
Reply to  David Kwavnick

and wasn’t Bobby K as federal prosecutor starting to take an interest in the mafia and the trade unions ?

Douglas H
Douglas H
2 years ago

There was actually an excellent British documentary in the 1990s that demolished the film along with the Sunday Times’s conspiracy stories. They should show that on Amazon Prime.

Christopher Hilton
Christopher Hilton
2 years ago
Reply to  Douglas H

Wow, the BBC, Sunday Times and Amazon. Paragons of truth. Do you live in Toyland?

Last edited 2 years ago by Christopher Hilton
Rod McLaughlin
Rod McLaughlin
2 years ago

One thing I like about the movie JFK was the way the director ever-so-subtly hinted that he didn’t actually believe the conspiracy theory, and showed how easy it was to deceive the viewer using sophisticated film techniques. If you didn’t notice that, why should he care?

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
2 years ago
Reply to  Rod McLaughlin

The best bit of nonsense was having a character in the film state that LHO couldn’t fire three aimed shots in eight seconds with that rifle, and then to include a reconstruction in which that’s exactly what Oswald was easily able to do.
Also, the film shown wasn’t the Zapruder film but a remake of it, which undermines any claim about what it shows.

LCarey Rowland
LCarey Rowland
2 years ago

So the smoking gun on the grassy knoll was never proven; is that it?

Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart
2 years ago

And cue the Unherd Conspiracy Charabanc for a day trip to Lala land……don’t forget to wave to Alice!

Last edited 2 years ago by Ian Stewart
Jim Richards
Jim Richards
2 years ago

I was a Kennedy conspiracy believer until I read Posner. He poses several questions that conspiracists can’t answer but, for me, the prime one was ‘What sort of conspiracy lets its prime shooter wander round a city after an assassination and shoot a police officer? Why wasn’t he collected (and disposed of) immediately?