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JFK: More Than Just A Conspiracy

                It is a film about one of the most important events in the nation’s history.  It is a film about one of the most disputed events in the nation’s history.  There is no shortage of questions surrounding the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Director Oliver Stone is not shy of voicing his opinion over the matter and he does so in one of his most important films, and maybe one of the most important films of the last half of the 20^th Century. One can go online and find countless reviews of Stone’s 1991 film JFK, so I will try to make this slightly original. What stands out most to me is that this movie uncovers a larger problem than JFK, a problem of government secrecy.

                First, I will start my proclaiming my fascination with the films look inside the life of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison and how he became obsessed with finding answers to the mysterious assassination. Garrison did what many people would never dream of doing, and that is to sacrifice his own “life” to uncover and reverse something he felt was ruining the fabric of our country. Garrison obviously didn’t sacrifice his life by means of death, but he sacrificed his family life, his job and reputation in the search of what he thought was justice. The task before him was monumental and perhaps unwinnable from the onset. He never wavered though, as he began uncovering covert CIA operations and a paper trail of evidence supporting something far more elaborate than what the American people were being told. In a broader sense, his search was more for truth in general than it was to find the real story behind that fateful day in Dallas. It is this reason that I feel he succeeded and it is this part of the JFK movie that I wish to expound upon.

                For some, this movie may have been a simple one, the question of who was really behind the assassination. But for me, it was more than that, and I believe for Jim Garrison it was more than that. What seemed to be frustrating Garrison the most was that he was encountering so much resistance in his quest for answers to his questions. While perhaps Garrison never found the truth he was looking for, he most certainly uncovered the fact that the truth had not been fully divulged by the government. His quote “telling the truth can be a scary thing sometimes” sums up his plea to have some basic questions answered. Eyewitness accounts never seemed to match up with the story the American people were told. People were detained and questioned and released, the events of Lee Harvey Oswald’s day did not make sense, nor did he even seem to be capable of pulling off such an act. The parade route being rerouted at the last minute and the fact that Presidential security was much less than it normally would have been, are all reasons to believe that this was an event some, more than just one man, knew was coming. It seemed every time Garrison stumbled upon something that did not make sense, he found another and another.

                The culmination of Garrison’s efforts, the trial of Clay Shaw, seemed a bit anticlimactic to me. It never seemed like Garrison really had a case against Shaw and I never really thought he would get a guilty verdict. I am unsure that Garrison himself even expected one. The most important part of the movie for me was Garrison’s closing arguments where he talked of the erroneous “magic bullet theory” and of how one day, his son could go into the National Archives and see the files of what the CIA and FBI really knew. It was a gripping speech that may have strayed from the objective of convicting Shaw, but hearkened us all to stop and think about whether our government was telling us the truth and if they weren’t, how come? This was more an attack on the US Government as a whole than just on Clay Shaw.

                Was there a conspiracy to kill JFK that included top level government officials or the FBI or CIA? I don’t believe we will ever know that for sure. But Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone made it crystal clear that it is a distinct possibility and I believe the movie was a referendum on government transparency. I believe it did a lot of good too, or at least some. One benefit that came from this film was the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. This act released for public availability a lot of the records and documents pertaining to the assassination of Kennedy. The act itself stated that all records be released, but everyone knows that they were not, in fact the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) has requested that the CIA turn over some 50,000 pages of documents relating to the assassination. (FOIA Blog)  To add to that, and as Stone points to in the film, even now public and most popular Warren Commission documents are possibly filled with erroneous and forged testimony. Can we even believe the documents that have been released, let alone how many have not?

                Perhaps a little bit of trust in the powers that be is in order to avoid going completely crazy, but a bit of questioning is in order here. If Oliver Stone’s movie does nothing else, it begs the question “what is our government not telling us and why.”