James DiEugenio - JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass

Copyright 2022 by James DiEugenio

Introduction copyright 2022 by Oliver Stone

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Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-7287-8

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Contents

JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass
(Annotated Transcript of Two-Hour Film)

JFK: Destiny Betrayed (Annotated Transcript
of Four-Hour Film)

Introduction
by Oliver Stone

M ore than three decades ago, I met a woman named Ellen Ray at a film festival in Havana. She and her husband, Bill Schaap, ran a publishing company called Sheridan Square Press. She told me words to the effect: DoI have a book for you! Little did I know the impact that meeting in Havana would have on my life.

The book that the late couple had published was Jim Garrisons On theTrail of the Assassins. Jims memoir was about his investigation and prosecution of the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Garrison was the district attorney of New Orleans at the time of Kennedys assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald had lived there in the summer of 1963, before heading back to Dallas, allegedly through Mexico City. On November 22, 1963, with startling alacrity, Oswald was accused of killing Kennedy, wounding Governor John Connally, and then murdering a local policeman, J. D. Tippit. By nightfall, Oswalds pro-communist activities in New Orleans and his purported trip to Mexico were being used to convict him in the public mind. That drumbeat continued on Saturday and through Sunday morning. At that time, an event almost as shocking as the assassination of President Kennedy occurred. It was the first live murder on television: the shooting of Oswald by local bar owner Jack Ruby. As Dallas FBI agent James Hosty commented, it was as if the world had gone mad.

It was because of that live TV killing and the seeming loosening of America from its moorings that certain people in the Power Elite, like columnist Joseph Alsop, convinced the new president, Lyndon Johnson, that he needed to create the Warren Commission. What was happening in Texas seemed like a Wild West show. Therefore Johnson appointed seven seemingly august men to act as a substitute tribunal for the trial Oswald could not have. The Commission worked in secret, with one exceptionattorney Mark Lanewho wanted to represent Oswalds interestdemanded his interview be open to the public. Can one imagine such a scenario unfolding today? The press would scream at the top of their lungs that the American people were being deprived of their constitutional right to know what was happening. There would be lawsuits galore. But yet, in 1964, when the Commission began to hold hearings, no one said anything about the closed doors surrounding the investigation of this momentous triple homicide.

But it was even worse than that. Because once the report was issued in late September 1964, the mainstream media accepted it without qualifications. In fact, as we note in our documentary, JFK Revisited, there can be little doubt that CBS television cooperated with the Commission in advance. After all, they showed a two-hour special the night the Warren Report was issued which fully endorsed the Commissions conclusions. One might ask: how could CBS read nearly nine hundred pages and put together a 120-minute program about it in one day? The obvious answer is they could not. As our film shows, CBS let it be known that they would cooperate with the Warren Commission. For that homage, they were allowed to interview witnesses of the Commissions choice.

CBS was not alone. NBC broadcasted a one-hour program on that same day. And the New York Times printed a supplement to their newspaper which contained almost the entire report. As author Barry Ernest states in our film, the Warren Report is a convincing volume until one reads the twenty-six volumes of testimony and evidence it is based upon. And here is the almost overwhelming irony. Those volumes would not be published until almost two months later! Therefore, how could one judge the Warren Report unless one read the accompanying volumes? Because that is where the raw data was located. What this all meant was this: Oswald had been convicted in the public mind the weekend of the assassination; he was then shot and killed in the arms of the Dallas police on live television; ten months later he was now being officially convicted by the seven-man panel that Johnson had appointed to oversee his case. All done without an attorney to present his side of the story.

As we demonstrate, the idea the Commission was unanimous in its verdict was always a myth that was sustained by a lazy and obedient press. As time went on, we learned that Senator Richard Russell, Representative Hale Boggs, and Senator John Sherman Cooper all had grave doubts about the Warren Report. They were particularly suspicious about CE 399, which Mark Lane later termed the magic bullet. As we show, President Gerald Ford, formerly a member of the commission, later revealed to French President Valery Giscard dEstaing that they felt an organization was behind Kennedys murder, one they could not locate. With the true dispositions of those four people revealed, the Commission becomes a minority report.

The reason that did not really matter is that the most active member of the Commissionthe one person who did not have a job at the timewas Allen Dulles. Due to his personal circumstances, Dulles could devote more time than the others to the internal workings of that body. And he did. As Walt Brown proved in his study of the Commissions activitiesThe WarrenOmissionno one asked more questions and no one attended more meetings than Dulles did. But further, why did Johnson choose Dulles for the Commission anyway? He must have been aware that Kennedy relieved him of his coveted duties as director of the CIA because Dulles had lied to him about almost every aspect of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

There was something else happeningand going unnotedat about the time the Commission volumes were published. Just fourteen weeks after their release, the first combat troops landed at Da Nang in South Vietnam. As we prove in the film, not only was this a drastic alteration of Kennedys policy, but Johnson knew he was changing Kennedys policies. Further, the new president was doing this at the same time he was saying he was