Reclaiming History (318 page)

Contrary to Kennedy’s being soft on Communism, the generally accepted view of historians has been that Kennedy, with a nod here and a nod there to political doves, was a moderate. Some even felt he was a cold warrior at heart. We know, for instance, that during his less than three years in office at the height of the cold war, and despite the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (between the United States, Soviet Union, and Great Britain) that was agreed on in July of 1963 but not formally ratified until October 7, 1963,
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he substantially increased our military capability against Russia as well as the nation’s defense budget. In the president’s speech in Fort Worth on the morning of the assassination, he pointed out that “in the past three years we have increased the defense budget of the United States by over 20 percent, increased the program of acquisition of Polaris submarines from 24 to 41, increased our Minuteman missile-purchase program by more than 75 percent, doubled [i.e., increased by 100 percent] the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert, doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces, increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by over 60 percent, added five combat-ready divisions to the Armies of the United States and five tactical fighter wings to the Air Force of the United States, increased our strategic airlift capability by 75 percent and increased our special counterinsurgency forces which are engaged now in South Vietnam by 600 percent.”
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Since our sworn enemy at the time was Soviet Communism, and therefore this military buildup was, indeed, against the Communist threat, not the Bolivian civilian militia, certainly the American military couldn’t be too unhappy with the above numbers, could it? Nor could the defense industry (the “industrial” part of Stone’s military-industrial complex), which made billions off building these weapons, have been.

And after all, it was Kennedy who campaigned for president in 1960 arguing that there was a “missile gap” between the Soviet Union and us (citing the launching of the Soviet
Sputnik
on October 4, 1957, and by a powerful rocket, the Soviet SS-6, that was capable of reaching U.S. soil from Russia) that America had to close and then overcome;
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who challenged Russia to an arms race in 1961; and who made Nikita Khrushchev blink during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. And it was Kennedy who wrote these words to Khrushchev on April 18, 1961: “Mr. Chairman…You should recognize that free people in all parts of the world do not accept the claim of historical inevitability for Communist revolution. What your government believes is its own business; what it does in the world is the world’s business.” In a letter to Khrushchev on October 22, 1962, Kennedy wrote that “the United States could not tolerate any action on your part which in a major way disturbed the existing over-all balance of power in the world.” As Pierre Salinger has written, “If the strength and stridency of Kennedy’s anti-communism have ever been in doubt, they should be dispelled…The theme of anti-communism [was] recurrent” in his administration. In NSAM 132, a memo to Fowler Hamilton, administrator of the Agency for International Development, signed by Kennedy on February 19, 1962, Kennedy said, “As you know, I desire the appropriate agencies of this Government to give utmost attention and emphasis to programs designed to counter Communist indirect aggression, which I regard as a grave threat during the 1960’s. I have already written the Secretary of Defense ‘to move to a new level of increased activity across the board’ in the counter-insurgency field.”
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Conscious, as all presidents are, of their place in history, one can reasonably assume that Kennedy would have made every effort to prevent a geopolitical tilt toward Communism in the world from taking place “on his watch.”

But all of this is really beside the point. Since X categorically tells Garrison in the film about the military-industrial plot to kill Kennedy, and there are scenes in
JFK
actually depicting the Joint Chiefs of Staff setting in motion this conspiracy to murder Kennedy, what evidence does Stone have that such a conspiracy actually took place? For starters, as previously indicated, Stone has admitted that he made up the scene in Washington between X and Garrison. Moreover, Stone has no
evidence
that such a conspiracy ever took place. He simply manufactured the entire conspiracy out of whole cloth for his gullible audience. But he
did
have a source for the naked
allegation
that such a conspiracy took place: the redoubtable, aforementioned Fletcher Prouty—you know, the fellow who was an active member of the group that believes the Holocaust is a Jewish hoax. Just who, specifically, did the late Mr. Prouty allege were the members of the military-industrial complex who actually conspired to murder Kennedy? Prouty didn’t mention one single name, falling back, instead, on the always available, guilty, and universally maligned “they.”

But let’s listen to Prouty tell, in his own words in Lyndon LaRouche’s publication,
Executive Intelligence Review
, what he believed happened. Prouty said that after NSAM 263 was published on October 11, 1963, ordering the withdrawal of 1,000 military advisers from Vietnam,

to those working close to the scene in the Pentagon, and to those people who had the prospect of building helicopters and fighter aircraft and guns and tanks and all the rest of it, this was terrible. This was anathema.
They
had had plenty of orders through World War II. There was a big build-up for the Korean War, and now, for ten years,
they
had been building up on the prospect that there would be even a bigger war, a consumers’ war, for them in Vietnam. Amid all these pressures,
it’s not too unrealistic
[certainly not for someone like you, Mr. Prouty] to see that some of them sat somewhere and said, “Look, we’ve got to do some planning. We’ve got to get this guy Kennedy out of office.” And the more
they
thought about it, and the more
they
talked about it,
they
realized that legitimate, honest-to-God…political planning was not going to get him out. Kennedy was going to win. At that point, somewhere,
a small voice
said, “We’re going to get that bastard out right now,” and there are ways to do it. As Lyndon Johnson said, “We have a Murder, Incorporated,”
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a professional group—no Lee Harvey Oswald, or other goons like that—a professional group, trained, equipped, salaried, and everything, to do assassinations.
They
were given a job.
They
did their job.
They
killed the President. There was a coup d’etat in this country, and following it, the biggest residual job people have had within that group has been to run this cover story.
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This “small voice” Prouty imagined and speculated that “they,” the conspirators, heard, was heard only by Prouty. And when people start to hear small voices in their head…well, I think you know what I’m about to say.

So this small-voice reverie and naked theorizing of Fletcher Prouty’s was converted by Oliver Stone, with full knowledge that he had absolutely nothing to support it, into the motive for Kennedy’s murder in his fantasy movie. Stone presented to his audience Prouty’s fantasizing about the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the defense industry plotting Kennedy’s murder as though it actually happened. Prouty’s small voice, then, became the principal foundation and spin for the whole movie.

Two footnotes to all of this: First, when Robert Kennedy is shown in Stone’s movie being murdered in Los Angeles in 1968, Garrison tells his assistants, “They [the same power structure that murdered JFK] killed Robert Kennedy.” And it’s very clear that Stone wants his audience to believe that “they” also killed Martin Luther King Jr., whose murder is also shown. “And now King,” Garrison tells his wife in exasperation over her less-than-total acceptance of his conspiracy theories. “Don’t you think this [referring to the Kennedy case by looking at the Warren Commission volume in his hand] has something to do with that [referring to the story on the television screen about King’s murder]?” Stone removed all ambiguity as to what he was trying to convey in
JFK
in a December 23, 1991,
Time
interview:

Question: “Is it accurate to say that you think the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are linked?”

Stone: “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 [the conspirators] pulled it off.”
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And when asked by a reporter in his appearance before the National Press Club on January 15, 1992, “Did you mean to imply in
JFK
that the U.S. government might be implicated in the assassination of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy?” Stone answered “Yes.”
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Second, as we’ve seen, Stone has occupants of the highest corridors of power in our national government conspiring with the nation’s most powerful business and industrial titans to murder President Kennedy. But as we’ve also seen, another major part of Stone’s
JFK
depicts the plot to kill the president being hatched by Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, and Lee Harvey Oswald in the presence of a homosexual prostitute. How did each of these two completely disparate groups happen to decide on killing Kennedy at the very same place and time? Did either get in the other’s way at Dealey Plaza? Or were they working together? But if so, how in the world would the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidents of our nation’s largest corporations have known of the existence of the shabby, New Orleans conspirators? And how would the latter have possibly known that the former were planning to murder Kennedy? When the Joint Chiefs of Staff, et cetera, decided to kill Kennedy, even if they somehow found out about their soul mates in New Orleans, would they have been likely to entrust the mission to kill the president to such a motley group of losers? Stone isn’t troubled by any of these questions and none are dealt with in the movie, Stone not providing his audience with any scene connecting the two groups.

29. Stone used X to dispense other goodies to his audience. X tells Garrison that he was in New Zealand at the time the president was shot and “Oswald was charged at 7:00 p.m. Dallas time with Tippit’s murder. That was two in the afternoon the next day, New Zealand time [nineteen-hour time difference between Dallas and New Zealand], but already their papers had the entire history of the unknown, twenty-four-year-old…Oswald—studio pictures, biographical data, Russian information—and were pretty sure he killed the president.” This was proof to X that the conspirators had determined before the assassination that Oswald was to be the patsy and they already had information to send out on him before he was even charged. But number one, was X, who supposedly was in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the time (Prouty, allegedly, actually was), the only person in a foreign country who felt the information about Oswald reached him or her (such as an employee at a newspaper, or radio or TV station) earlier than it should have? The information on Oswald went out from Dallas throughout the entire civilized world and there’s nothing in the vast literature I have seen on the assassination indicating that anyone in Paris, Rome, Brussels, Berlin, London, or anywhere else, felt they received information on Oswald earlier than they should have. Or was X suggesting that for some unfathomable reason the conspirators were interested in getting out a quick story on Oswald only in Christchurch, New Zealand? What was so important about Christchurch?

In any event, Stone doesn’t tell his audience that there was nothing unusual about the New Zealand paper having an “Extra” edition (headlined “Kennedy Shot Dead”) out on Oswald and the Tippit killing by 2:00 p.m. on November 23. Without even hearing what the Christchurch newspaper’s explanation for all of this is (see later), if the first information on Oswald went out over the wires in Dallas at 7:00 p.m., when Oswald was charged with Tippit’s murder, then obviously this would not have given the New Zealand paper enough time to have already published details about Oswald’s life at that moment in New Zealand, which would be 2:00 p.m. the next day. But information on Oswald’s background started going out over the wires several hours
before
he was formally charged with Tippit’s murder. Though he was charged at 7:00 (actually 7:05) p.m. Dallas time, he was arrested five hours and ten minutes earlier, at 1:50 p.m. Dallas time (8:50 a.m. the next day, New Zealand time), and Captain Glen King, Dallas police chief Jesse Curry’s administrative assistant, testified that he had heard that an hour after Oswald’s arrest (2:50 p.m. Dallas time, 9:50 a.m. New Zealand time) a member of the media already had a photo of Oswald.
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All indications are that from the moment Oswald arrived, in custody, at the Dallas Police Department around 2:00 p.m. forward, it was the policy of the Dallas Police Department to be very cooperative with the press and to make them privy to the main things happening on the case.
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However, I have been unable to find a record of which media outlet first got the news out about Oswald’s arrest and the time it did so. But under no circumstances was it later than 3:54 p.m. Dallas time when Bill Regan of NBC News announced on national television that “Lee Oswald seems to be the prime suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.” So wire stories about Oswald’s background would have started going out all over the world no later than 3:54 p.m. Dallas time (10:54 a.m. New Zealand time), giving any newspaper in New Zealand over three hours, more than ample time, to publish a brief sketch of Oswald’s background before 2:00 p.m.

After Stone’s movie was released, the
Christchurch Star
, responding to conspiracy theorists, reported that the
Star
“knew of Oswald’s being in custody by 10 a.m.” and immediately “began gathering information about him.” The paper said that