[ Oliver Stone sat down with Jacobin to discuss JFK Revisited:
Through the Looking Glass, his new documentary that exhaustively makes
the case that the national security state, including the CIA and FBI,
killed John F. Kennedy — not a lone shooter.]
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OLIVER STONE TALKS ABOUT JFK’S KILLING  
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Ed Rampell interviews Oliver Stone
November 23, 2021
Jacobin
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_ Oliver Stone sat down with Jacobin to discuss JFK Revisited:
Through the Looking Glass, his new documentary that exhaustively makes
the case that the national security state, including the CIA and FBI,
killed John F. Kennedy — not a lone shooter. _

President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade in Dealey Plaza in Dallas,
Texas, where he was fatally shot., photo: Rob Wilson / Ixtlan Archive
// Jacobin

 

To mark the fifty-eighth anniversary of the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy as well as the thirtieth anniversary of his
landmark film _JFK_, three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone returns to
the scene of the crime in his new documentary _JFK Revisited: Through
the Looking Glass_.

After scoring an Oscar for writing 1978’s _Midnight Express_,
1991’s _JFK _capped what is arguably the most meteoric rise of a
filmmaker with a radical sensibility in Hollywood history. Stone’s
1986 classic grunt’s eye view of combat, _Platoon_, earned four
Academy Award nominations and won four more, including Best Picture
and Best Director. He was also nominated that year for Best Writing of
both _Platoon_ and _Salvador_, which explicitly opposed President
Ronald Reagan’s Central America policy. The Vietnam War veteran won
his second Best Director Oscar for 1989’s antiwar _Born on the
Fourth of July_, which was also nominated in the Best Picture and Best
Writing categories. Two years later, Stone’s enormously
controversial but influential _JFK _received six nominations,
including for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing, and won
in the editing and cinematography categories.

Less well-known, however, are Stone’s more recent documentaries
about Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Hugo Chavez, and 2012’s
nonfiction miniseries for Showtime, _The Untold History of the United
States_. Now, that cinematic scourge of the status quo is back with
the nearly two-hour documentary _JFK Revisited: Through the Looking
Glass_. In it, Stone goes further than he did in 1991 in trying to
crack the case and reveal who the great helmsmen of Kennedy’s
assassination were. The seventy-five-year-old auteur spoke
with _Jacobin _via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles and proved, as
the Russian revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky put it, there’s
no gray hair in his soul.

ED RAMPELL: THERE IS AN AGE-OLD DEBATE AS TO WHETHER OR NOT ART CAN
CHANGE THE WORLD. BUT YOUR MOVIE _JFK _SEEMS TO HAVE SETTLED THAT
QUESTION BECAUSE AFTER IT WAS RELEASED IN 1991, THE PRESIDENT JOHN F.
KENNEDY ASSASSINATION RECORDS COLLECTION ACT (ARCA) WAS PASSED
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THE US CONGRESS IN 1992. WHAT WAS THAT LAW, AND WHAT DID IT DO?

OLIVER STONE: The law mandated that a panel of citizens would examine
the records — not all of them, but a good portion of them — then
they would have access to them, and they could declassify them. I
don’t know what the exceptions were. The Assassination Records
Review Board lasted until 1998, it worked for four years, then they
ran out of money. As US district court judge and chairman of the
Assassination Records Review Board John R. Tunheim says in the film,
it could have gone on for a long time, because there was a lot of
information. But they did what they could, and they actually did some
very good work. And that’s why we wanted to bring attention to it in
the film. It’s a rare occurrence when a film can cause any kind of
honesty on behalf of the government.

Let’s not kid ourselves on the government, the representatives —
among them, Joe Biden — who voted for it and who recently classified
the files again for another few years. They were giving in to public
pressure — a lot of people wrote letters and were upset. One of the
reasons they were upset was the House Select Committee on
Assassinations’ (HSCA) files, as we said in the crawl at the end of
the film, were closed until 2039, I believe. But they haven’t opened
them. The House Select Committee has not given those files.

Nor have we seen files from the CIA, which are very important. And
I’m talking about the agents around the case, around the Cuban
community. People like George Joannides and David Atlee Phillips. E.
Howard Hunt — who confessed on his death bed to a lot of stuff that
was going on — as well as William Harvey, who was a very important
agent with the Cuban station in Miami, who was around the edges of
this assassination and a real Kennedy hater. These people were
important. But also, more important, were Allen Dulles and Richard
Helms. These were the guys who were the bigger fish.

ER: WHAT IS SOME OF THE NEW AND MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION YOU
DISCOVERED BECAUSE OF ARCA AND OTHER SOURCES SINCE YOU MADE _JFK_ IN
1991?

OS: You’re asking me a huge question. First of all, they
declassified a lot of files; among them we find clear evidence that
Kennedy wanted to withdraw from Vietnam, from the Pacific SecDef
meetings in early May, ’63.

We find out that Lee Harvey Oswald has the fingerprints of
intelligence all over him for years. They’ve been reading his
mother’s mail for three, four years. He’s an agent — or he’s
some kind of contact with the CIA. And he’s protected. Because he
comes back from Russia, nobody talks to him, nobody debriefs him. But
he’s sent on various assignments, in New Orleans, Fort Worth, and
Dallas, until he can be used.

You have all the autopsy evidence, which we knew about back then, but
now it’s more confirmed than ever. That there was a big hole, an
avulsion wound in the back of Kennedy’s skull on the right side,
which indicates clearly a shot from the front. [The Texas School Book
Depository building, where Oswald purportedly fired from,
was _behind_ the president.]

It puts to shame the Warren Commission — we go into details of the
fact that it was really a “Dulles Commission,” more than a Chief
Justice Earl Warren Commission. Dulles controlled a lot of the
proceedings and made sure the CIA did not reveal any information. They
did not even know there were Cuban assassination plots. They did not
know about the history of assassinations by the CIA. They were kept in
the dark.

They did not know about the history of assassinations by the CIA. They
were kept in the dark.

The nurses, all the people at Parkland Hospital [where Kennedy died],
they were talked to. We talked to the FBI agents James Sibert and
Francis O’Neill, for example, who were at the Bethesda autopsy [of
Kennedy], and with their own eyes, testified to the hole, to the
wound, in the back of Kennedy’s skull. And when the official
photographer John Stringer was asked again if these were his photos of
the autopsy, he said, “Clearly, no. This is not my film.”

Also, in the shot, in the open car, his skull was seen flying off.
Pieces — the Harper fragment was found in the street the next day
[by William Harper at Dealey Plaza] and wasn’t admitted to
testimony. [Conspiracy theorists consider the Harper fragment to be
evidence that JFK was shot from the front, from the storied grassy
knoll.]

The testimony of the three women in [the Texas School Book Depository
building], the three secretaries — secretaries are very important,
because they pay attention to details — the moments the shots are
fired, they’re on the fourth floor, two of them run downstairs,
within a minute — they never see Oswald in the staircase. Then
Dorothy Garner, their supervisor, an older woman, who’s also very
bright, she goes to the edge of the stairs and doesn’t see Oswald
when she’s looking down. So, how does Oswald get the hell from the
sixth floor down to the first floor in one minute, even less? You
can’t stash the rifle, do all the things he’s supposed to have
done on the sixth floor. Which leads me to believe he was not even on
the sixth floor. A lot of people have said that already, and I believe
it, but definitely, the way the bullets were laid out, the way the
rifle was left, no fingerprints on the rifle — nothing could have
held up in court. No fingerprints on the rifle at all—it’s not the
same rifle! It’s not the same bullets. We go into all that. All of
the original evidence from day one was corrupted.

ER: A LOT OF THIS IS IN _JFK REVISITED: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS_.

OS: We also have a lot of other details, like the movements of
Oswald, the protection for Oswald, the “flash warning” that’s
removed on him so that he’s not picked up before the Dallas visit.
There’s a flash warning given by the FBI — that pulls off any
Secret Service from picking up Oswald, which he would have been picked
up on.

ER: THE SINGLE DETAIL THAT IS MOST CHILLING TO ME REGARDING THE
ASSASSINATION IS “THE TWO OSWALDS.” CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THAT
THEORY, AND DO YOU BELIEVE THAT’S TRUE?

OS: We went into that in the 1991 movie. In this version, we simply
show the two other assassination attempts on Kennedy, in Tampa,
Florida, and Chicago. In both cases we have an Oswald figure; he
wouldn’t have been called “Oswald” necessarily. We have two men
who are exactly the same profile as Oswald — marines, went to
Russia, came back, and seemed to have agency [CIA] connections.

There was a tall building in both cases, which the motorcade was
supposed to go by, the tall building was perfect to slow down the
vehicle, like it was in Dallas, and the assassination would have
occurred. The one in Chicago did not go forward because the Secret
Service was warned and Kennedy canceled the trip. In Tampa, it did go
forward, and nothing happened. But there was a lot of talk. In other
words, they were look-alike assassination sites, exactly the same,
with the same kind of profile. And also, both of these other men had
also joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and were involved in
pro-Castro activities. So, whoever was going to take the fall for the
assassination had to have Castro links. Which indicates that they were
trying to blame Cuba and the USSR for the assassination.

ER: WHAT HAS STILL NOT BEEN DECLASSIFIED AND RELEASED THROUGH ARCA
AND OTHER SOURCES?

OS: House Select files, which have not been declassified. Those are
the ones that originally — remember, they came to the conclusion
that there was a conspiracy. That was classified right away. So, we
don’t know exactly how they came to that conclusion. That’s a big
deal.

In addition to that, of course, the CIA files. The Secret Service
destroyed their files in 1995 because the investigators were barking
around and asking questions about these two Kennedy trips to Chicago
and Tampa. And of course, we know the story of Abraham Bolden —
that’s an important story, the black Secret Service agent who
Kennedy, it was one of his ideas to hire a black agent. He wanted to
integrate the Secret Service.

We want to know more about these people, I mentioned some of them
before to you, and that would be valuable — but we don’t know,
because they’ve stonewalled from the beginning. For example, George
Joannides, the guy who ran the Miami CIA station, very crucial in the
Cuban community, was reappointed to work with the House Select
Committee in 1975, ’76. But it was never revealed to HSCA Chief
Counsel Robert Blakey that Joannides had worked with the Cuban
community in 1963, ’64. That’s an outrageous thing. Blakey was
shocked. He said, “I’ll never believe the CIA again. They told me
he hadn’t been involved in the case. I wanted an objective, outside
observer.” But Blakey was fooled by the CIA.

ER: WHAT DO YOU SUSPECT IS THE ROLE OF FORMER CIA DIRECTOR ALLEN
DULLES IN THE KENNEDY LIQUIDATION AND THE COVER-UP?

OS: Plays a huge role that we can never — we’ll never find a
smoking gun that links him. But he was all over the case. After he got
fired by Kennedy in ’61 he was bitter, he said so later to writer
Willie Morris about his feelings about Kennedy, who he said “thought
himself a god.” He was fired with two of his people. But Kennedy
never cleaned house, which was huge. He should have gotten rid of
everyone.

Because Helms basically took over the agency — he was the assistant
to John McCone. McCone was an outsider — Helms ran the place, and
Helms knows a lot. So, we should have the files on Helms, as much as
possible. He was working with William Harvey — he brought Harvey
back to work with the Cuban community.

"We’ve been in forever wars — we never stop."

And we know also know now from the film that Lyndon Johnson was
against the withdrawal plan from Vietnam, you see. We have a phone
conversation with him and Robert McNamara, and he says to McNamara,
“You know, I was against you and the president.” He was very cocky
at this point — but when he was vice president, he would shut up.
So, you know that Lyndon Johnson totally opposed withdrawal from
Vietnam, which Kennedy definitely wanted. McNamara made it very clear
in his book that Kennedy was going to withdraw from Vietnam, win or
lose. The same thing was said by McGeorge Bundy.

Now, you can argue that we don’t know what would have happened, but
the man, Kennedy, we try to establish, was an anti-colonialist. He’d
been involved in Algeria, he’d been involved in Vietnam as early as
1954. And he said repeatedly these Third World countries needed their
independence, and he was against the concept of a Cold War, against
communism being used as an excuse to suppress independence — in the
Congo, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Algeria, all over the world. And in
Latin America, especially, he was very strong with his Alliance for
Progress.

All of that was scrapped when he was killed, by Johnson. All of that
was scrapped. The whole era of hopefully progressive policies on the
part of the American administration was changed. We went back to the
old hardcore Dwight Eisenhower–Allen Dulles way of dealing with
foreign countries.

ER: SO, WHAT WAS OSWALD’S ACTUAL INVOLVEMENT, AND WHAT ROLE DID HE
PLAY?

OS: Speculation, but I definitely don’t believe he was on the sixth
floor. I believe he was working with contacts in the agency [CIA]. He
had contacts — he was an informant for the FBI, too. He knew Jack
Ruby, who killed him.

Lee Harvey Oswald after arrest by the Dallas Police. (Rob Wilson /
Ixtlan Archive)
He knew he had been set up. I think that he knew he was in trouble.
When you see the man in the corridor, you see a completely cool
operator who knows how to behave in these situations. He wasn’t the
so-called crazed, lone-nut assassin who screams, “I got him! I got
him! I did it for my country!” All that shit — no. He was saying,
“I need a lawyer.” He wanted a lawyer, which is one thing, and he
said, “I don’t know anything about this.” Which is true — he
didn’t know anything about the actual killing.

He really was a man, I think, who was cool under pressure. He talked
with the authorities at the police station after several hours over
Friday, Saturday, before he was moved on Sunday. But no records were
kept of what he said.

ER: ISN’T THAT STRANGE?

OS: Well, everything is very disturbing.

ER: WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO SOMEBODY WHO DISMISSES THE KENNEDY
ASSASSINATION AS JUST “ANCIENT HISTORY”?

OS: Oh, bullshit!

ER: WHAT IS ITS RELEVANCE TO TODAY? WHY IS FINDING OUT THE TRUTH
ABOUT WHO SHOT JFK SO IMPORTANT IN 2021 AND BEYOND?

OS: 

Because in 1963, our so-called democracy went down the drain. After
Kennedy was killed, there’s been no American president — none! —
who has been able to challenge the authority of intelligence agencies
or the military. Their budgets keep growing, and they have carte
blanche. In other words, no one can change what they’re doing, and
they’re on a course to protect our national security — which, of
course, they define in the most unrealistic terms. So, under that
aegis, you can do pretty much whatever you want. You cannot touch
national security as president — it’s a third rail in politics.

I think the media has no desire to bring this back as a subject.
It’s a memory hole. But it’s very important because you have to
behold American foreign policy, what we’ve been doing. We’ve been
in forever wars — we never stop. That’s what Kennedy was fighting
about — he was a warrior _for_ peace, for peace. And he saw the
problem of Pax Americana — his speech at American University, his
desire for détente with the Soviet Union, and Cuba, too. He was a man
who’d been to war, he knew war, he didn’t believe in the generals
anymore. He thought they were old men who’d lost contact with
reality.

Operation Northwoods, all the crazy schemes they devised to invade
Cuba, shocked him, horrified him. That’s what he was dealing with
— a war-state mentality that came out of the 1950s. It’s actually
true, the Pentagon wanted war with Russia, they wanted to go for it
now because they figured in the future Russia would build up its
nuclear arms. And they wanted to get them now. This was the Curtis
LeMay point of view.

_[OLIVER STONE is a filmmaker, three-time Oscar winner, and author
of Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing, and Surviving Platoon,
Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador, and the Movie Game (HMH Books,
2020)._

_ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:_

_ED RAMPELL is an LA-based film historian/critic, author
of Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United
States, and coauthor of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.]_

_OUR FALL ISSUE IS OUT IN PRINT AND ONLINE THIS MONTH. SUBSCRIBE AT A
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START READING TODAY._

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