Article 2431 of misc.activism.progressive:
From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: X, Y and JFK
Message-ID: <1992Feb4.013402.19730@pencil.cs.missouri.edu>
Date: 4 Feb 92 01:34:02 GMT
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/** media.issues: 216.0 **/
** Topic: X, Y & JFK **
** Written 3:58 pm Feb 3, 1992 by nytransfer in cdp:media.issues **
From: Blythe Systems
Subject: X, Y & JFK
Via The NY Transfer News Service 718-448-2358, 718-448-2683
From m.morrissey@asco.comlink.apc.org Sun Feb 2 10:52:29 1992
X, Y and JFK
by Michael Morrissey
February 1, 1992
Contrary to what the critics have been saying, there is far more
fact than fiction in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, and its thesis--
that the assassination was a coup d'tat by the warmongers--is the
most credible explanation of the facts, and the lack of them, to
date.
It will be good to release the remaining classified documents, as
ex-President Ford and the Warren Commission lawyers have now
requested, but I doubt that they will add anything to what is
already known, namely that the Warren Report is a pack of lies.
If the powers that be are so determined to get at the truth, why
don't they just dig up the body, like they did old Zack Taylor
last spring? If there isn't a fist-sized hole in the back of
Kennedy's skull, the conspiracy theorists will have some
explaining to do. This won't happen, though, or if it does, the
skull will disappear at the crucial moment, just like the brain
did, just like a dozen witnesses did, just like a mountain of
other evidence did.
One could almost get nostalgic reading the reviews of JFK,
watching all the old lies being dutifully trotted out again by the
lapdog corporate press, which hasn't raised a paw to challenge the
government's "lone nut" theory of history (extended to the murders
of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King) for the past 28 years.
It is 1984+8, we must bear in mind, a difficult age to
understand. Our current president, a spook, wages war on a former
employee (Noriega) and on the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler
(Saddam Hussein), killing tens of thousands but missing the
demonic bull's-eye both times, watches while another spook
(presumably for the other side), affectionately called Gorbi, ends
the Cold War, and now our spook tells us (in his State of the
Union address) that we won it, just like we won the Gulf War and
yes, by God, the Vietnam War too! What's a Magic Bullet compared
to this? Some of the worst shots at Stone are coming from the
left, I'm sorry to say, since I think Marx had some good ideas
(unfortunately massively misapplied), though if pressed I will
admit more readily to being a Thoreauvian conservative ("For
government is an expedient by which men would fain [like to]
succeed in letting one another alone"--Civil Disobedience).
In The Nation (Jan. 6/13, 1992, p. 7), for example, a magazine I
usually agree with, Alexander Cockburn says, perfectly inanely,
that "there was no change in policy" regarding Vietnam between the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations. This is what the history
books say, but the history books also say Oswald shot Kennedy,
which makes it the second biggest lie of the century--No. 1 being
the Warren Report. The main point of Stone's film is that Kennedy
was killed because he had decided to pull out of Vietnam by the
end of 1965, a documented fact (National Security Action
Memorandum 263, signed on Oct. 11, 1963) which Cockburn, like his
establishment colleagues, stubbornly ignores.
David Corn, another Nation columnist who even thinks he knows
something about the CIA, weighed in two weeks later with his own
diatribe against what he called Stone's "forcing and twisting
facts into comic-book format" (The Nation, Jan. 27, p. 80), but
doesn't name a single fact that Stone got wrong. He correctly
recognizes Gen. Y as Edward G. Lansdale, the real-life Ugly
American (in Lederer and Burdick's novel of the same name) and
Quiet American (in Graham Greene's novel), Dirty Trickster par
excellence, maker of US-puppet leaders (Magsaysay in the
Phillipines, Diem in South Vietnam), and Kennedy's own choice to
head the CIA's Operation Mongoose, but none of this is "twisted"
in the film. X says that after Mongoose was officially disbanded,
at least part of it was secretly continued and turned on Kennedy
himself. This is a theory, but it is not "twisting the facts."
What Corn means is that he believes that Lansdale was a "creative
and sometimes nutty guy" who had nothing to do with JFK's
assassination and that "Mongoose was ended by the Cuban missile
crisis in 1962." That is the government line, and could have come
direct from the CIA public relations office. If Corn wants to
swallow it, that's his problem.
There is a picture in Jim Garrison's book (On the Trail of the
Assassins, NY: Sheridan Square Press, 1988) of the three so-called
tramps (one obscured), two so-called policemen, and a fifth man,
walking away from the camera. None of these people, incredibly,
have ever been identified, the most logical explanation for which
is that Garrison is right and that they are all government agents.
Some claim the fifth man is Lansdale. Corn would call this
"twisting the facts" too, probably. But what "facts"? They
disappeared. What do you call that, and the thousand other
flagrant examples of non-investigation (to put it mildly) in this
case? I call it a coverup. We are not only entitled to speculate,
we have no other choice.
X, Corn may like to know, in real life is Col. L. Fletcher
Prouty, US Air Force, retired, who knows a hell of a lot more
about the CIA and Lansdale (who died a few years ago) than he
does. Those of us who know Prouty and his work have no trouble
recognizing either him or Lansdale, whom he worked with on many
occasions during his nine years at the Pentagon as liaison officer
to the CIA (1955-64). Prouty's 1973 book The Secret Team: The CIA
and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World
(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall) is even more relevant and
insightful today than it was two decades ago. Everything that X
says in the film Prouty has said elsewhere, in numerous articles
and interviews, and he is widely quoted in intelligence and
assassination literature. He wrote the appendix to Robert Groden
and Harrison Livingstone's High Treason (Baltimore: Conservatory
Press, 1989) and the introduction to Mark Lane's Plausible Denial
(NY: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991). Strangely--or not so
strangely--his second book has been ready and waiting for years,
but he hasn't found a publisher with guts enough to put it out.
Maybe the Stone film will change that.
I feel a strong affinity with Stone. He went to Vietnam, and I
spent the war years in college and graduate school dodging the
draft and hating the politicians who wanted me to go too. I
especially hated their intellectual henchmen, like McGeorge Bundy
and Rostow and Kissinger, who were supposed to represent reason
but exuded only madness and destruction. The national security of
the United States at stake in Vietnam? If that was joke, no one
was laughing.
If not, what was it? A "tragic error," the historical engineers
tell us now, a well-intentioned mistake. But one thing I could
never understand: How could they could have been so stupid? They
came from Harvard and MIT (and, as I didn't realize at the time,
CIA), and I couldn't even get into Harvard. I knew I wasn't
smarter than they were. It was coming to grips with the
assassination that answered this question for me. They weren't
stupid, they were lying--maybe to themselves as well as to us, but
they were lying.
That realization had the same effect on me as it did on Stone,
from what I've read. The catalyst for him was reading Garrison's
book in 1988. For me it was a British TV documentary called "The
Men Who Killed Kennedy," produced by Nigel Turner, which was
broadcast in October of the same year in England and subsequently
in 30 other countries--but not in the United States until three
years later (in Sept. 1991 on the A & E cable network). I saw it
in November 1988 in Germany, where I live. I had never even been
curious about the assassination, never read a single book about
it, never heard the words "coup d'tat" in connection with it
before, but that film hit me like a freight train. It didn't
mention Vietnam, but later, when I read in the assassination
literature about Kennedy's withdrawal decision, my mind caught up
with my gut. I knew what had hit me: the truth.
Prouty appears toward the end of the Turner film--a big,
square-jawed, athletic-looking man with that steely glint in his
eyes that earnest military men seem to acquire as an accoutrement
to their uniform. My father and brother went to West Point, one
uncle to Annapolis and another to the Coast Guard Academy, and I
spent my childhood on Army posts, so I know what I'm talking
about, and I suppose that also has something to do with the
impression Prouty made on me: I know the type. I don't trust them
or distrust them, but I can listen to them. Prouty struck me as
honest, reasonable and courageous then, and that impression didn't
change when I met him or during the two and a half years we have
been corresponding. I wrote a nine-page review of the Turner film,
quoting Prouty at length, because I felt his statement said it
all. I still do:
"I think without any question it's what we called the use of
hired gunmen. And this isn't new. In fact, this little manual
here, which is called "the assassination manual for Latin America"
[Clandestine Operations Manual for Central America], says that,
talking about Latin America, "if possible, professional criminals
will be hired to carry out specific, selective 'jobs'--"jobs" in
quotes, which means murders. Well, if this manual for Latin
America, printed within the last few years, and a government
manual, says that, there's no question but that the application of
the same techniques was dated back in Kennedy's time--in fact I
know that from my own experience. You know, I was in that business
in those days. So, with that knowledge, you begin to realize that
hired criminals, the way this book says, can be hired by anybody
in power with sufficient money to pay them, but, more importantly,
with sufficient power to operate the coverup ever after.
"Because you see it's one thing to kill somebody; it's another
thing to cover up the fact that you did it, or that you hired
someone to do it. That's more difficult. So they used the device
of the Warren Commission to cover up their hired killers. Now, who
would hire the killers? And who has the power to put that Warren
Commission report out over the top of the whole story? You see,
you're dealing with a very high echelon of power. It doesn't
necessarily reside in any government. It doesn't necessarily
reside in any single corporate institution. But it seems to reside
in a blend of the two. Otherwise, how could you have gotten people
like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to participate in the
coverup, the police in Dallas to participate in the coverup,
etc.--and the media, all the media, not just one or two
newspapers, but none of them will print the story that anybody
other than Oswald killed the President with three bullets--
something that's absolutely untrue."
I wasn't able to get my review published, but I sent copies to a
number of people, including Stone, and now that I see the role
that Prouty plays in JFK (he is not mentioned in Garrison's book),
I like to think I had something to do with getting Stone and
Prouty together. In any case, we're all in the same foxhole now.
Garrison, Prouty, and Stone are courageous men, and JFK, I hope,
will prove to be a great public service. I am suspicious of Time
Warner's motives for producing the film, however. After all,
Time-Life is the company that kept the Zapruder film locked away
from public view for 17 years, and is hardly a bastion of dissent.
So far, with the press feverishly toeing the "Get Stone" line, the
impact seems negligible, if not negative. What if JFK turns out to
be the assassination film to end all assassination films--and
inquiry? What will we do when all the commotion dies down? Forget
it? Back to business as usual? You can't say it any louder than
Stone has said it, and if that doesn't do it, what will? A lot of
people will be asking themselves that question.
On the other hand, the film speaks for a lot of people. According
to a recent Time/CNN poll, 68% of the 73% of Americans who thought
the assassination was a conspiracy (i.e. 49.6% of all Americans)
said the CIA or the US military may have been involved (Time, Jan.
13, 1992, European edition, p. 40). That's 125 million Americans
who think Stone may be right! Maybe that's the half that doesn't
bother to vote. Certainly it is the half whose opinions are not
reflected in the "responsible" press, since all of our "opinion
leaders" are too propagandized to even think such thoughts, much
less express them.
But what if some of those 125 million people get tired of just
being cynical, and get mad (as they should)? What about the
vets--the victims--whose fates were sealed with Kennedy's? The
Vietnam War gave 570 billion tax dollars (allowing for inflation)
to the warmongers. What will the 24.5 million Americans now on
food stamps think of that? We saw it once, in 1968, when Martin
Luther King and Robert Kennedy were on the verge of forming a
people's coalition that would have shaken the teeth out of the
power elite. That's why they were killed. The revolution was
decapitated. (Both murders, like that of the president, were
conspiracies, despite Received Opinion.) But this radical dissent
from Hollywood, which also gave us John Wayne and Ronald Reagan,
may have unpredictable effects. Who knows, maybe Time Warner and
the rest of the corporate mind-control oligarchy have a surprise
in store for them.
Michael Morrissey
Am Ruesteberg 6, W-3501 Niestetal, Germany
Tel. 0561-527327, FAX 0561-8043341
E-mail: m.morrissey@asco.zer.de
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