James DiEugenio - Reclaiming Parkland

Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi,
and the JFK Assassination
in the New Hollywood

J AMES D I E UGENIO

WITH A PREFACE BY L ISA P EASE

AND A FOREWORD BY W ILLIAM D AVY

Skyhorse Publishing

Copyright 2013 by James DiEugenio

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-62636-533-9

Printed in the United States of America

To my aunt and uncle, Louis
and Ernesta Spong, who raised me

With Reclaiming Parkland, Jim DiEugenio has performed a valuable service. Fifty years after the assassination of President Kennedy, with so many of the facts now available, its truly hard to understand how so many figures in the media continue to get the basic facts of the assassination so wrong.

Jim approaches this subject from a new angle: by examining the built-in biases of these authors and filmmakers based on past projects and decisions. His revelations go a long way toward explaining how people as bright as Vincent Bugliosi or as lovable as Tom Hanks nonetheless fail to understand and correctly present this history.

In this book, Jim exams the recent books and scripts that Hollywood has made (and is making) into films and challenges their core theses. I, too, received a copy of the script of Parkland while it was still in development and was stunned at how overtly dishonest, in terms of the actual facts, it was. Ive written screenplays. I understand the necessity of reshaping history in small ways to fit a dramatic narrative. Im one of the first to say, and did say about Charlie Wilsons War, hey, its just a film.

But Im also a student of propaganda methods and techniques, and I know well how fictional presentations of history can inform or mislead an entire generation. I enjoyed Charlie Wilsons War because Im an Aaron Sorkin dialog addict, and I wasnt expecting that any of the so-called history presented would be true. But I support the argument of others. Many people think they critically consume a film, only to refer to events from them later as if they were fact. Most people assume that if a film is purportedly based on a true event, it will be largely true in the important details. This is not always the case.

Ironically, that was the case with Oliver Stones overly maligned film JFK. Sure, he combined several characters into new ones, compressed timelines, and changed what people had said. You have to do that to tell a more-than-three-hour story in three hours. But as someone who has studied the Kennedy assassinationspluralfor twenty years, I was amazed at how much director Stone and screenwriter Zach Sklar got right. I recognized dialog that came word for word from transcripts of Warren Commission testimony. I knew who the characters were meant to represent, even when the names had been changed or two or more people combined into a fictional character. But the essence of every scene was based on the facts as they were known at the time. So beyond being a fantastic moviegoing experience, which is all anyone should ever expect from a fictional story, it was also, remarkably, quite true to its subject.

The same cannot be said for Parkland, Charlie Wilsons War, and an upcoming film based on books by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann. These presentations dont just distort history. They misrepresent it in ways so serious one can only call them propaganda.

That this is also true of Vincent Bugliosis book Reclaiming History, however, is vastly more disturbing. Its not a film; its a book. It is supposed to be a nonfiction presentation. Yet it is so rife, as Jim aptly demonstrates, with errors and distortion that it, too, can only properly be labeled propaganda.

In this presentation, Jim ranges far afield, giving us details of the Manson murders as reported in Bugliosis most famous book, Helter Skelter, and examining in some detail a mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in which Bugliosi participated. Knowing how much Bugliosi had gotten wrong in Reclaiming History, Jim looked into those earlier cases to understand Bugliosis biases.

Similarly, one cant really understand why Tom Hanks would produce a movie like Parkland without understanding who Tom Hanks is, what motivates him, and why he gravitates to certain types of projects.

Jim also considers the powerful and sometimes sinister relationship between the Pentagon, the CIA, and Hollywood. It may be harder than ever to get honest films made in the future if we dont confront this growing alliance.

A filmmaker in Hollywood shared a story with me that is relevant here. He had made a documentary about the JFK assassination. Before he went to the meeting where the studio executives were to vet his project, Oliver Stone had handed him a copy of the now-famous CIA memo that dictated instructions to its media assets as to how to refute notions that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. The filmmaker entered the room, and the atmosphere was jovial. He distributed the memo, ran to the restroom, and returned. Suddenly, the atmosphere in the room had turned stone cold. He soon found out why. The author of that CIA memo was one of the people at the vetting table, and the memo had just outed him to the other participants. Its a bit chilling to consider that the CIA is so deeply embedded in Hollywood that it has the ability to put the kibosh on projects it might feel threatened by. Perhaps that, more than anything, explains the trouble, as Jim discusses, that Salon founder and author David Talbot had when he tried to get a documentary made based on his book Brothers.

This book should initiate a discussion of the role that Hollywood increasingly plays in shaping, and often distorting, our history. Because once history is polluted, like the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, Alaska, it can take decades to clean up.

Thats why this book is important. This is a book that seeks to dredge that sludge up and return a clearer history to us. Im grateful to Jim for dedicating a significant portion of his life to this monumental task.

Jim did not embark on this journey alone. The book is laden with acknowledged contributions from many lesser-known researchers who have toiled for decades for the same reason Jim has: history actually matters. Our understanding of history determines our future course. If we figure out what happened, then we know what we need to do next. Perhaps the biggest reason some people prefer to read the false history is that it requires nothing of us. If Oswald alone killed Kennedy, theres no reason to change anything about ones life. But if the government lied to us, if the media is still lying to us, that tells us just how much was and is still at stake and that we need to take action if we wish to change course. Not everyone wants to confront that reality. Heck, my life would have been simpler had I never picked up Jim Garrisons fine book on the Kennedy assassination,