Stone's JFK and the Declassified Files

A Review of the record

I recently had the opportunity to do a podcast appearance on JFK Facts. This is the interview show about the JFK assassination hosted by journalist Jeff Morley and his co-host attorney Larry Schnapf. Both men are well versed on the case, have spent much time studying it and have done a lot of work for the cause of attaining transparency about it. (On You Tube it is Podcast # 103, “Trump’s Order and Rep. Luna’s Probe”)

It was a pleasant and, I hope, educational experience for all who were watching and listening. Although we talked about the declassification of the Kennedy files, Morley asked me an interesting question about their relationship with Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. After all, it was Stone’s film which provoked the national uproar and caused congress to pass the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992. There were hearings in both the House and Senate and people like Stone, author Herbert Parmet, and congressman Louis Stokes testified. The legislation passed overwhelmingly. That act allowed President Clinton to appoint the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in 1994. This was a five person citizens panel which was tasked with declassifying all the still secret records concerning the murder of President Kennedy.

In four years they declassified about 2 million pages. Due to a shortage of personnel and funding, they did not complete the assignment. But by law everything was supposed to be let loose in October of 2017. Only the president could stop that from happening. Both Presidents Trump and Biden did so. During the recent presidential campaign, Trump was badgered by both Andrew Napolitano and Joe Rogan as to why he did not do so after he tweeted he would. So this year Trump signed an executive order that declassified the remaining JFK files; and would also begin to declassify the MLK and RFK secret files.

Over many objections, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has now released over 70,00 pages of documents. These have made a lot of noise in the MSM: on TV, in newspapers and on the web. What is kind of odd is that these stories seem to have all but forgotten what the ARRB did back in the nineties. The fact is the Board accomplished a lot back then. But, predictably, the media did not cover it. In Stone’s JFK Revisited both Board Chairman John Tunheim, and Deputy Director/Spokesman Tom Samoluk complained about this press failure. For instance, the medical investigation by Chief Counel Jeremy Gunn and Military Records Analyst Doug Horne provided some very compelling evidence about what happened during Kennedy’s autopsy. The only MSM story on that report was by the Washington Post.

On his program, Morley asked me to name three things that the Board had revealed that would back up what Stone depicted in his 1991 film. If the reader will recall, that film was savagely attacked before it appeared. In fact the assaults began in May, seven months before it debuted in December. The first attack was by Jon Margolis in the Dallas Morning News. (See the valuable compendium JFK: The Book of the Film, p. 189) In other words, reporters and writers were smearing a film they had not seen! Can one imagine an editor approving a critique of a book that the reviewer had not read? Or reporting on a speech the journalist had not seen or heard? But somehow it was fine for writer after writer to bitterly assault a movie that not only they had not seen, but the public hadn’t.

In retrospect, this was probably the point: to prejudice the public so they would be predisposed against the film. There is something sociologists call institutional memory. The press is an American institution, one with a long memory. They realized that they had made a grave error back in September of 1964 by accepting the Warren Report without reading it; or reviewing the 26 volumes of evidence that came out over a month later.

But as Stone and myself pointed out in JFK Revisited, it was even worse than that. Both NBC and CBS aired primetime specials praising the report on the day it was released to the public. How would that be possible? The report was 888 pages long. The programs had to be benefiting from leaks by the Commission. Much later it was revealed that they were. (See the book, JFK Revisited, pp. 93-94). This is clearly a violation of journalistic standards and practices. One which the late CBS assistant producer Roger Feinman complained about--and was terminated for pointing out the violations. (See my story, “Why CBS Covered Up the JFK Assassination” at Kennedys and king.com)

Most people in the know today consider the Board to have been a mixture. They did declassify hundreds of thousands of documents. But according to Doug Horne’s book, not one of the Board members believed President Kennedy died due to a conspiracy. (Inside the ARRB, p. 10). The first Executive Director, David Marwell, voiced the public opinion that he found much of value in Gerald Posner’s book, Case Closed. He was also on friendly terms with Posner, Gus Russo and Max Holland—all of them anti-conspiracy authors. But, Horne added, if Marwell had not been of this view, the Board would not have hired him. This is why, in their Final Report, they said that Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK was largely fictional. (see p. 1) Which makes one wonder if the Board members read their own declassified documents.

In response to Morley’s question about three points from JFK that were later proven, I started out by saying people questioned if there was an effort to undermine New Orleans DA Jim Garrison with subterfuge from the CIA. The film depicted infiltrators in his office and also audio surveillance. It turns out there was such an organized Agency effort, and it is due to the ARRB that we know about it.

In September of 1967, the CIA convened a meeting of several high officials at the request of Director Richard Helms. According to the documents released by the Board, this meeting included Director of Plans Thomas Karamessines and James Angleton’s trusted first assistant Ray Rocca. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 270) Helms orders were to consider the implications of what Garrison was doing before, during and after the trial of Clay Shaw. Rocca began the meeting by saying he felt, “Garrison would indeed obtain a conviction of Shaw for conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy.” (ibid). From studying the declassified files, no one knew more about Garrison’s inquiry inside the CIA than Rocca did. The group decided to take actions and enumerate tasks. The results were self-evident and provable. The Agency met with judges to block subpoenas, they sent in specialists to work the local media to eliminate any favorable coverage of Garrison, the local CIA station began meeting with Shaw’s lawyers directly—which had not been done prior—and they began to actually work on flipping Garrison’s witnesses. Finally, they did send in infiltrators, e.g. Bill Boxley. (ibid, pp. 271-84)

But perhaps the most ominous document we have today on this subject is only a cover sheet. But that sheet says that the file originally included 14 folders, and the Agency itself had it classified until 2014. It was labeled a Black Tape Operation and it came out of James Angleton’s office. The dates of the operation coincide with the beginning of jury selection and the not guilty verdict of the Shaw trial. In my opinion this should be a prime objective of congresswoman Anna Luna’s committee, which is trying to fish out JFK documents from the CIA. These files may reveal how violent acts were perpetrated on prosecution witnesses before they could testify, e.g. Richard Case Nagell, Aloysius Habighorst and Clyde Johnson. (DiEugenio, p. 294)

Another reason for the negative reception of Stone’s film was his overarching thesis about the Vietnam War. The film said President Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam at the time of his death; and that President Johnson reversed that withdrawal program and turned it into an American escalation.

This is another large issue that the MSM completely missed at the time. Therefore, the attacks on this aspect of the film had an almost violent tone to them. George Lardner went after this concept twice in the pages of the Washington Post. (5/19/91; 6/2/91) He called it nonsense. Lardner then went further. Quoting his own source, he said about the withdrawal ordered in NSAM 263 :“Kennedy…would have done it just as Johnson did it…Any thought that it had anything to do with getting out, withdrawing entirely, is absurd.” The attacks on Stone’s two sources for this thesis--Fletcher Prouty and John Newman, especially the former—were also beyond the bend.

It turns out that the Review Board, and Newman, proved that the thesis was correct. The documents produced by the Board concerning the May 1963 Sec/Def conference in Hawaii demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was in charge of that plan. (See the book JFK Revisited, by James DiEugenio, p. 186) McNamara was gathering withdrawal schedules from the CIA, State, and Pentagon representatives who were stationed in Vietnam. When he looked at them he said they were too slow. These documents were so convincing that even the New York Times ran a story titled, “Kennedy had a Plan for Early Exit in Vietnam”. (by Tim Weiner, 12/23/97)

Newman was also allowed to listen to McNamara’s exit debriefs at the Pentagon. On those tapes, the Secretary of Defense said that he and Kennedy had decided that theirs was an advisory mission only. After they had done all the training they could in Saigon, they were getting out. And it did not matter if our side was losing or winning: we were leaving. (JFK Revisited, p. 187)

Finally, with declassification of tapes from the Johnson administration we now know that LBJ understood he was reversing Kennedy’s policy, and he tried to get McNamara to go along with the masquerade that he was continuing it. He actually told his Secretary of Defense, “How in the hell does McNamara think, when he’s losing a war, he can pull men out of there?” Johnson said this was a foolish statement for McNamara to have made, “But you and the president thought otherwise and I just sat silent.” (James Blight, Virtual JFK, p. 310).

In other words, Johnson understood what Kennedy was doing. And he was trying to disguise his break with that policy through McNamara. In August of 1964, with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, America would declare war on North Vietnam. In March of 1965, Johnson would send the first combat troops to DaNang. What Kennedy did not do in three years, Johnson did three months after being elected. By the end of 1965, America had 175,000 combat troops in theater. The disaster was just beginning.

The third point I brought up on the Morley podcast was about Clay Shaw. Even in 1991, many viewers bought into Shaw’s perjury at his trial:his declaring he had never been associated with the CIA. He repeated this in public many times. In his 1991 film, toward the end, Stone showed that Richard Helms admitted under oath that Shaw had been an interview subject for the CIA in their businessman’s contact service.

That ended up being a cover story-- which was also exposed by the ARRB. Shaw was a highly valued contract agent who had a covert security clearance for a project code-named QKENCHANT. (JFK Revisited, p. 197) In declassified files from the CIA, the agency is surprised that Shaw refused to even tell his own lawyers about this.

In that regard, I could have added two other things about Shaw that pierce his self-serving attempts at playing Mr. Clean, smeared by a rogue DA. We now know for certain that Shaw used the alias Clay Bertrand, since we have 12 people who have confirmed that fact. We also know that New Orleans lawyer Dean Andrews admitted that Shaw was the Clay Bertrand who called him and asked him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald. Andrews could not say this openly, since he said his life would be in danger if he did. But he confided it to author Harold Weisberg, who he pledged to secrecy until after he passed on. (JFK Revisited, p. 198)

I could go on. For instance with the fact that both the CIA and FBI had surveillance and infiltration programs going on against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Therefore, with Oswald working out of Guy Banister’s New Orleans office in the summer of 1963—as the city’s only FPCC member—it appears he was part of this program. (See Paul Bleau’s milestone 3 part article “Exposing the FPCC” at kenendysandking.com) And Stone’s depiction of the failures of the Kennedy autopsy look mild compared to all we know today about that horror, again because of the Board. (JFK Revisited, pp. 155-68)

The Review Board was wrong to call JFK largely fiction. It turned out that it was largely fact. Proven so by their own declassifications.