011ie fiber Alles
Collier, Peter
Peter Collier 011ie Ober Alles Oliver Stone's triumph of the will. The summary moment in JFK comes when Kevin Costner, as Jim Garrison, addresses the jury in a closing argument that the former...
...Organized crime had been assaulted as never before (and never since) by RFK's Department of Justice...
...ently stumbled onto the subject while in Havana (where he, like other Hollywood radicals, has "taught" at a film institute with ties to Cuban intelligence...
...involvement that he intrigued to get David Halberstam, then reporter for the New York Times, out of the country because his dispatches were creating the image of a "quagmire...
...The historical Kennedy, almost as much of a cynic as Stone himself, would have gotten a good yuk out of all this political correctitude...
...and the USSR (and between the U.S...
...JFK and his advisers were disturbed by the way Diem and his brother-in-law Nhu, head of the secret police, were oppressing the Buddhists and thus decreasing South Vietnamese support for the war effort...
...cidal sergeant in Platoon is one of Stone's versions of Uncle Sam...
...Jack, people who still keep airbrushed profiles of the Kennedy brothers hanging in their parlors and who get teary-eyed when contemplating their martyred promise...
...No politician in our time has equalled his adroitness in wetting a finger and putting it up in the air to see which way the truth was blowing...
...The President felt that there was a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win," Bobby replied without hesitation...
...The summary moment in JFK comes when Kevin Costner, as Jim Garrison, addresses the jury in a closing argument that the former New Orleans district attorney never actually gave...
...presence in Vietnam from 600 men when he came into office to 16,000 by the time of his death, giving the commitment there critical mass...
...In Scarface, America is the mound of cocaine into which the vicious Cuban gangster buries his face...
...we experience the director as a political commissar...
...He wants to break it down and reconstitute it, not as a warning or even a lesson...
...and Nazi Germany, for that matter), but Jack Kennedy did not...
...Like Duke, Stone postures as a concerned citizen...
...The Christics' argument— laid out with the architectonic obsession characteristic of the La Rouchies and other colonists on the frozen edge of the lunatic fringe—was that during the early stages of the Cold War a "secret team" of intelligence operatives and conspirators had taken over America and was now leading it into war in Central America just as earlier the team had led it into Vietnam.' Stone has drawn upon his body of "fact" (while also pillaging the Fascism has always been the charge implicit in Stone's work, although until now it has been the word that dare not speak its name...
...Perhaps the only other director in the history of film who has relied so heavily on a Wagnerian cartoon of good and evil, fabricated such hypertrophied and demonstrably false contrasts, and used the medium for such a relentless visceral assault on logic and rationality is Leni Riefenstahl...
...T here is an irony in his obsession with the term...
...Colonel X tells him, in effect, that he has been dealing only with the clowns...
...Confusing the mind and exciting the senses, JFK fails every test of history and morality, but it is nonetheless a triumph of Oliver Stone's malicious will...
...Any other filmmaker who scapegoats so vehemently, who pushes a line of propaganda so insistently, or who roots so violently in dark places for enemies...
...Who profited from the assassination...
...JFK was the consummate spectator, always on the sidelines, chronically uncommitted, a kissing 'See David Brock's pathbreaking article, "Christie Mystics and Their Drug-Running Theories," in the May 1988 TAS...
...The viewer is allowed no moral complexity, no layering of nuance, no sense of discovery, only the feel of the jackboot on the neck...
...As with Duke, the net effect is of someone speaking in tongues...
...The Mafia had the most to gain...
...Asked point-blank if his brother had intended to pull out, "losing" China...
...Bobby answered bluntly, "No...
...another is the rapacious capitalist in Wall Street, In Born on the Fourth of July, America paralyzes youth and promise...
...Stone asks the question confident that the answer is obvious: American fascism...
...Stone's America is a clockwork nightmare state operating flawlessly on behalf of an invisible junta...
...There were also rumors that Nhu was about to open back channels of negotiation with Hanoi...
...n the furor manufactured to promote the film, Stone has postured as a Ralph Naderoid figure fighting to return government to the people...
...Ellen Ray, publisher of Covert Action Information Bulletin and work of a generation of assassination theorists) to organize his own inchoate hatreds into a "theory": the fascists killed Kennedy because they were alarmed by indications that he had undergone some sort of conother such works, handed Stone a copy of Jim Garrison's On the Trail of the Assassins while riding in an elevator with him...
...Bobby was in charge of it, and spent considerable time in Florida in the months before the assassination, obsessing on the assembly of its nuts and bolts...
...And for those who reply that history should be irrelevant to art, it might be pointed out that in this case art ought to refrain from calling for the reopening of history's sealed files...
...Yet one thing Kennedy never questioned was the intellectual foundations of the Cold War...
...Stone has neither sorrow nor pity for those he claims are America's victims, only hatred for the country itself...
...All of the invention in JFK, in fact, has the feel not so much of technique as of autobiography...
...When a visitor to the Oval Office in 1962 noted that RFK was uncharacteristically somber, Jack quipped, "Don't worry about Bobby...
...The American Spectator April 1992 29 cousin of the "cool hipster" in Norman Mailer's early musings...
...But it can be safely assumed that Oliver Stone is not one of them...
...This was the turning point of the war...
...But Stonecould not consider it because the Mafia is extrinsic to American society (if not to the Kennedy presidency) and thus not serviceable as the foundation for a theory about the fascism that grows out of America's malign heart...
...Or Castro...
...He's all choked up over Martin Luther King and his Negroes today...
...28 The American Spectator April 1992 JFK is filled with hallucinatory imaginings, with theories that appear and vanish like UFOs, and with necrophiliac fondlings of the Kennedy corpse...
...One wonders if those who have decorated JFK with Golden Globes, Directors' Guild awards, and six Oscar nominations realize that beneath the varied surfaces of Oliver Stone's films there has always been a single obsessive theme, repeated with jackhammer insistence: America is evil, sick beyond recovery and decadent beyond redemption...
...What will he take on next...
...The character of Garrison he distilled from the book bears no more resemblance to the real DA of New Orleans than the protagonist of Born on the Fourth of July does to the real Ron Kovic, whose tragedy is not so much having been paralyzed from the waist down by Vietnam as having been paralyzed from the neck up by leftism later on...
...It takes a visit to Colonel X, the Deep Throat figure played by the saurian Donald Sutherland, for the DA to see the big picture...
...Huge numbers of ground forces would now have to replace advisers there as part of the inevitable build-up...
...Particularly with the piquant subplot of Sam Giancana and Judith Exner, it would have made good cinema...
...He has always used film like a Luger, and now he has fired again...
...Such a historical record is of course irrelevant to Stone...
...Horowitz) of Second Thoughts About Race in America (Madison Books...
...And Castro is always ready to roll the dice when his own survival is at stake, as we learned once again from recent revelations that he would have used tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a U.S...
...She glorified a strong and innocent Hitler at his Nuremberg rallies...
...invasion...
...There probably are people who still believe in the myth of St...
...in The Doors, it kills the alternative lifestyles that promise a way out of the dead end...
...Stone must have savored the irony later on—discovering a way of indicting America while whooping it up in the anti-American capital of the world, the very country with whose Maximum Leader John Kennedy had gone mano a mano during the two and a half years of his presidency and (at least if lifespan has anything to do with it) lost...
...Instead, a month before his trip to Dallas, he gave the green light to the CIA to stage a coup—a real, not imagined one—against the South Vietnamese government, which resulted in the assassination of Diem and Nhu...
...Before the coup, the Saigon government might have been a slender reed, but afterwards it was put into receivership...
...More significant by far than the putative thousand-man withdrawal was the way Kennedy handled the problem presented by the Diem regime in Saigon...
...It is the same disingenuous persona that David Duke has adopted, and it conceals a comparable moral imbalance...
...He had ridden to the presidency on a platform that excoriated Ike for cutting defense and fabricated the existence of a Missile Gap...
...If JFK really believed it was South Vietnam's war to win or lose, and if he really wanted to get out, this was the perfect moment...
...JFK is the cinematic equivalent of rape...
...Like his obsessed talk radio host in another film, Stone cajoles, sneers, accuses, and bullies...
...Garrison's acquaintance Carlos Marcellos had been overheard musing that the best way to get rid of Bobby would be to kill Jack...
...Stone damns a weak and guilty America in the ongoing Nuremberg trial he has been staging for the last decade...
...In JFK he finally musters the courage...
...Some of the techniques Mongoose considered for achieving its end—giving the Cuban leader a poisoned wetsuit, or exposing him to depilatories that would rob him of his macho beard—may have been comic, but the ultimate purpose was deadly earnest...
...Stone might portray Operation Mongoose as a sort of Gay and Cuban Mercenary Action Day, but in fact, Mongoose was an operation whose purpose was to kill Castro, not Kennedy...
...In Salvador, America is the death squad that stalks the Third World...
...And, of course, the speech he was scheduled to deliver in Dallas on the day he died was as hardline as any he had ever given...
...30 The American Spectator April 1992 Cui bono...
...One suspects that Stone exempts the period between 1945 and 1963 only out of dramatic necessity...
...Because nothing is what it seems, everything must be what it is not...
...He makes much of Kennedy's remarks at American University in June 1963 ("We must reexamine our attitudes towards the Soviet Union"), while in fact this speech was an anomaly in terms not only of what Kennedy said earlier in his presidency but also what he said later on...
...He wanted even more to outdo the charismatic revolutionaries, like Fidel and Mao, whose sibling rival he became, once their wars of national liberation seized the world's imagination...
...Is there anyone else in Hollywood who has pushed a radical vision so ruthlessly...
...In another context, he would no doubt cheerfully admit his contempt for Jack Kennedy, just as in JFK he has viciously slandered a far weightier liberal icon, Earl Warren...
...Jack was aware of the secret plan...
...And once in office, Kennedy in fact greatly heated up the Cold War with the truculent rhetoric teased out of the pen of speechwriter Theodore Sorensen...
...Indeed, the Mob's likely role in Kennedy's death was the focus of the 1979 congressional investigation into the assassination...
...The movie is only superficially about the death of a President...
...His objective is humiliated submission rather than enlightened agreement...
...Cui bono...
...But the provenance of JFK is hardly populist: Stone apparseem to have been up to something...
...Stone believes that it is...
...Stone administers an ideological litmus test to every frame...
...presence in Vietnam from 600 men when he came into office to 16,000 by the time of his death, giving the commitment there critical mass...
...Yet this was the President who increased the U.S...
...Stone asks us to believe that this was all presidential shtick, that Kennedy didn't take it seriously and secretly despised his own words...
...Like Riefenstahl, Stone places his art wholly in the service of the Big Lie...
...The most deceitful portrayal to come out of this movie is not Costner's as Garrison, but Stone's talk-show routine as the Last Honest Man, who wants nothing more than to make America live up to its own best self...
...In a last effort to knit together the wild and woolly threads of his conspiracy theory, Costner finally concludes his feverish speech, drops his voice for effect, and then says of the system that has produced this assassination: "You call it for what it is—fascism...
...engage in the long twilight struggle—his phrases would fill a Bartlett's of Cold War quotations...
...The homiPeter Collier is the author (with David Horowitz) of The Kennedys, Destructive Generation, and, most recently, Deconstructing the Left (Madison Books), and the editor (with Mr...
...Interviewed for an oral history for the Kennedy library in 1964, RFK was asked about his brother's attitude toward the war...
...It is unlikely that someone doing revolutionary tourism in Havana would bite the hand that blandished him, but there are plausible scenarios for a plot involving Castro...
...Two weeks after appearing at American University, JFK was in Berlin (which he personally believed was the site most likely to, trigger World War III), giving his famous speech of defiance and commitment...
...Kennedy had not only faced down Khrushchev in the Missile Crisis but also regained the momentum for the U.S...
...It is a conspiracy so vast (as Joseph McCarthy, a kindred spirit of Stone's, might have said) that the numbed populace perceives the unspeakable as normalcy and continues to graze on affluence and pleasure while pastured in repressive tolerance...
...Both men have a hidden agenda, something dark and destructive writhing under their protestations about public good...
...The man who was so fixated on micromanaging the U.S...
...He toyed with the notion that Walt Rostow, architect of his aggressive competition with these men, could function as his "Marx...
...The question of whether or not the Holocaust really happened...
...The United States would now have the entire responsibility for waging the war...
...0 The American Spectator April 1992 31...
...in world affairs which had been lost to the Communists at the end of the Eisenhower era...
...K ennedy was always ready to change a policy, to backtrack and birdwalk, to reverse field, and to tell people what they wanted to hear...
...the owners of the circus are the men of the military industrial complex bent on making America a comfortable concentration camp...
...S utherland's words might well have been scripted by the Christic Institute, a cult of radicals devoted to the Sandinistas and the FMLN guerrillas that had an impact in Hollywood in the eighties, gaining support from personalities such as Kris Kristofferson, Jackson Browne, and Ed Asner, along with Stone himself...
...Its real subject is the fascist state we have been living in for the last twenty-eight years...
...The idea that JFK would have gotten us out of Vietnam was certainly not shared by Robert Kennedy...
...but as a blunt instrument...
...commitment there, once Barry Goldwater was vanquished in 1964...
...In JFK he finally musters the courage...
...Fascism has always been the charge implicit in Stone's work, although until now it has been the word that dare not speak its name...
...It is a mix of fact and fiction that in other hands might have been intellectually challenging, but in Stone's is used only to create an atmosphere of disinformation...
...The Soviets, for instance...
...The Cuban leader certainly had motive...
...As far as civil rights was concerned, he regarded the movement simply as an annoying problem, not an opportunity for political heroism, and not even the moral conundrum it seemed to be for his brother Bobby...
...Edward Jay Epstein has raised the possibility of—and, as the Wall Street Journal has suggested, an interesting movie might have been made about—a Soviet plot to kill the President...
...Played with dork earnestness by Kevin Costner, Stone's Garrison uncovers a coven of right-wing homosexuals, former intelligence operatives, and anti-Castro Cubans who version and was on the verge of becoming (in Stone's post-production conceits) an "American Gorbachev...
...Garrison, a quintessential sixties publicity hound whose prosecution of Clay Shaw was a spasm of performance art comprised in equal parts of homophobia and McCarthyism, and whose own background was marked by peculiar excursions into the penumbra inhabited by New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcellos, is transformed in this film into an American Cassandra, another of Stone's innocents double-crossed by his country, another naïf looking for an excuse to discover the worst...
...Oliver Stone may believe in moral equivalence between the U.S...
...JFK wanted to contain the Soviet Union...
...But not even his cinematic totalitarianism can remove the real suspects...
...Tragically," Stone has written, "these progressive, humanitarian objectives sealed his doom...
...As a young Democratic congressman, he had joined Republicans in attacking the Truman Administration for S tone puts much weight on the Kennedy Administration's trial balloon about withdrawing one thousand men from Vietnam, and the cognate fantasy, propagated by Camelot spear-carrier Kenneth O'Donnell, that this withdrawal was but a prelude to liquidating the entire U.S...
...But for the sake of his argument, Stone conjures up once again the tacky kingdom of Camelot and pretends that Kennedy had come out of the Cuban Missile Crisis a stronger and wiser man, with all his inner doubts resolved and ready to cash the country out of the Cold War...
...A plot was hatched to kill him because he might have "passionately sought détente abroad and an end of racist apartheid at home...
...blunt the spearpoint of aggression...
...His approach to history is deconstructive...
...This was the President who increased the U.S...
...The power of the nameless conspirators who control our government is so profound that they make the people think they are voting when they are really only validating the narrow range of choice offered by plotters of the "coup d'etat" staged the day John Kennedy was murdered...
...Bear any burden and pay any price...
...Duke believes America should be fascist...
Vol. 25 • April 1992 • No. 4
