JFK X: Solving the Crime of the Century

Reaches the heights of silliness

In my last entry, I described what I think will likely be a distinguished series on all four political assassinations of the sixties. That was the Libby Handros produced and John Kirby directed Four Died Trying.

I will now discuss a film that I am puzzled is even for sale on Amazon.  And it makes me wonder if there is any pre-screening policy there at all.  The title of this picture is JFK X: Solving the Crime of the Century.  The director of this film is Ryder Lee, in his first such effort.  (He has only appeared, almost subliminally, in a bit part in a very short film previously.) The writer and on screen talking head is Jay Weidner who is much more experienced in films.  The problem with Weidner is that he thinks we never went to the moon, and he finds the theories of David Icke quite bracing; in fact he has done a two part series with Icke. If you do not know who Icke is, he once endorsed the  anti-Semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He also believes in the shape shifters, namely the Archons who have hijacked the Earth.  This Icke concept is right out of  V, the 1983 NBC sci-fi mini-series.

Well, Weidner has now brought this kind of mentality to the John Kennedy assassination. He begins the film by saying:  Why did President Trump not follow through on the mandated final date to declassify all the John Kennedy  assassination files in October of 2017? This is a legitimate question.  But quite early the film begins to lose even a patina of legitimacy.  In fact, soon it actually makes the JFK films of Nigel Turner look tolerable.

The narration describes some of the battles the Kennedy administration was involved in: over Vietnam, support for civil rights, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s war against organized crime.  In  nearly record time, it begins to lose whatever patina of credibility these issues give it. Because it now puts forth the mildewed and completely discredited concept from that 1992 pulp novel Double Cross.  Namely that Joseph Kennedy was a bootlegger and the Chicago Outfit helped his son win the 1960 presidential election. This idea simply has no credibility on either side: that is Joe Kennedy was not a bootlegger and there was no Mob/Kennedy intervention in Chicago in the November 1960 election. Last Call,  Daniel Okrent’s distinguished book on Prohibition, proves the former, and Professor John Binder’s statistical study proves the latter. These are provably false constructs.  But the picture further erodes itself by using very questionable sources like Gus Russo and Michael Franzese to bolster these ideas. TV host Patrick Bet-David has let the blowhard Franzese run off at the mouth to  the point he has actually gained a following.  The man once said Marilyn Monroe was involved in the plots to kill Castro.  He kept a straight face while saying it. 

As the film says, Kennedy’s body was illegally hijacked out of Texas, and yes there was interference in the autopsy, and yes Kennedy’s brain and tissue slides are gone.   The film then goes to the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit. It used the infamous police radio 12:44 suspect description as the reason that Tippit stopped Oswald. But as many authors have pointed out, this was really a generic type description of a man who was 5’ 10”, about 30 years old and weighing about 165 pounds, who was also carrying a rifle. (Tim Smith, Hidden in Plain Sight, p. 532)  Where this description came from is an interesting mystery which the film should have dealt with, but it does not. In a harbinger of what is to come, we are told that Tippit looked like President Kennedy.

The film describes the Warren Commission as a cover up. One that was not revealed to the public until Geraldo Rivera showed the Zapruder film on ABC in 1975. Weidner then begins to concentrate on the Z film and jumps to the Jim Fetzer edited book The Great Zapruder Film Hoax. And it is here that the picture now begins to go completely off the rails into No Moon Landing and David Icke land.  I may or may not be getting this right: but I think what Weidner is saying is that Kennedy faked his own death by having a Movieland squib attached to his head and having a that squib go off simulating a bullet strike. And when Jackie leans out the back of the car she was actually retrieving a plate from the mechanism. But further, Secret Service agent Clint Hill knew what was going on when he climbed up the back of the limousine. The film then adds this: you don’t see any blood.  Well, I sure do.

Just when you think the thing cannot get worse, it does. Weidner says that it was Jackie who actually pulled the string on the squib and the Z film was altered to conceal this.

If only that was all.  Now the film descends into the realm of High Camp. Oswald killed both President Kennedy and Tippit, but since Tippit was a dead ringer for Kennedy—which he was not even close to—the body transported out of Dallas was his and not Kennedy’s.  So what happened to Kennedy? There was a secret compartment in the trunk of the car.  And I will now skip over some major details which I cannot begin to understand; but they say it was Tippit’s body that was autopsied at Bethesda. So all those 40 people or so that were in the room did not recognize that the corpse was not Kennedy’s? And Mrs. Tippit did not understand that it was not her husband’s corpse she saw?

Further into La La Land:  Oliver Stone saw the squib and he knew all about their usage from his film Platoon. But since he paid a lot of money to use the Z film, he stuck to a no squib scenario. This  is kind of funny since I know Oliver pretty well and we have spent a lot of time talking about the Kennedy case, since I wrote two documentary screenplays for him.  He never even suggested the above sci-fi scenario.

But, the FBI actually knew what happened and this is why they did not pursue a real inquiry into the case. Oh, and Johnny Roselli pointed this out to other gangsters.  Which relates to the reason d’etre behind the whole crazy scheme.  Since JFK’s father was integrated with the Mob—which he was not—John Kennedy wanted to get out of the presidency before the Mob could kill him. The film qualifies this solution, as it should, since its utterly without foundation.  Those critical of the Warren Commission missed all this since they did not see the squib go off.

And we are still not done. If the above is not enough to get you rolling in your seat, how about this: Mary Meyer also  faked her death in order to be with Kennedy. Oh, and Jackie went along with that?

I would like to say this was done tongue in cheek but I actually do not think it was, especially considering Weidner’s background with Icke and his No Moon Landing stance. The way I see this off the wall production is this:  I am all for freedom of expression. And if the film-makers wanted to set up a PowerPoint presentation at a public  library, then fine.  But Amazon is a corporation.  One would think they would have a quality control team overseeing what they sell or rent.  The problem with films like this is they trivialize and sideline those trying to do real and factual work on an epochal subject. The murder of President Kennedy is not a parlor game.  Many things happened as a result of his death, and most of them were bad; in fact some were terrible: like the Vietnam War. And I am sorry but I do not think Kennedy was such a coward that he would have faked his own death-- or he would not have signed up for duty in the South Pacific on those suicide mission PT boats. I also do not think the hundreds, if not thousands of people who have minutely examined the Z film in the intervening years missed the squib. I mean Bob Groden missed that?  And I don’t think President Trump reneged on the JFK Act because he found out it was Tippit’s body at the Bethesda morgue that night.

The last thing in the JFK field that we need today is a disciple of David Icke.