JFK Revisited: Through The Looking Glass (2021) (1 Viewer)

[Jack P]

Style wasn't "passed over." I'd point out that there are *many* witnesses that gave statements to the Dallas Police or the FBI in the period following who were not called to Washington to testify usually because (1) there wasn't a need to do so based on the totality of what had been explored elsewhere and (2) we have to remember the Commission had a tight deadline imposed by LBJ to be wrapped up before the Election and that admittedly forced them to have to decide what they should spend more time engaging their resources on in the limited time they have. That's admittedly unfortunate, but that isn't being sinister. The Warren Report includes Styles statement to the FBI made on April 3, 1964 along with the statements of many others interviewed during that period and very few of these people interviewed gave subsequent testimony. Saying they ignored her is being disingenuous because it suggests she had something else of relevance that merited calling her to Washington for further testimony about. You can find her statement here. https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh22/pdf/WH22_CE_1381.pdf

What exactly would Styles have told them that wasn't in her statement that they did consult and evaluate after hearing Adams testify? That she was with Adams? No one disputed that Adams and Styles went down the stairs, the key issue was one of what time did they go down the stairs? If they had claimed to have seen Oswald go down the stairs, *that* would have merited further questioning, but if they say they didn't see him then what we're left with is the question of what time it was. On that, the Warren Commission had to go to the other witnesses they had at their disposal and what they saw added up to a perfectly reasonable picture that Adams and Styles went down the stairs well after the time when Oswald would have been going down in the first minute following the shooting. Adams said in her testimony that when she emerged from the building, she saw employees William Shelley and Billy Lovelady immediately. But Shelley and Lovelady both stated that they had first gone away from the Building for over a minute before they returned which meant if Adams and Styles came down as early as they thought, they wouldn't have seen Shelley and Lovelady. And Piper was asked specifically if he saw Adams emerge from the stairs and he said no. That didn't mean they thought Adams and Styles were lying about coming down the stairs, but that they were mistaken in thinking they moved within seconds when it was a matter of a couple minutes minimum which is *after* Oswald would have gone down and reached the 2nd Floor lunchroom where hew was seen by Baker and Truly. It's a perfectly innocent explanation that Stone is making too much of a mountain of and cloaking with a sinister undertone of "they wouldn't let Styles testify" which is nonsense. The relevance is can the other witnesses corroborate the time element and the answer is they can't. You can not square all of *their* testimony and statements with the notion that Adams and Styles came down the stairs as quickly as they did that they would have been in any position to have seen Oswald or any other assassin descending (and someone had to get out of there quickly because shots were fired from that window. That's backed up by other witnesses who saw a rifle in the window, saw it being fired and in one case, Howard Brennan, saw Oswald firing it).

But this is just a classic example of how the conspiracy mindset works. They look for an anomaly and then don't stop to ask if that really represents the totality of the evidence. In this case, fixating on Adams and Styles is trying to tell the viewer there aren't any other witnesses of importance whose accounts are needed to verify the critical matter of *time*. One has to read the totality of what Adams said to then realize, "Gee, I'd better see what Shelley and Lovelady said." And then one has to ask, "What about the guy at the bottom of the stairs who saw Baker and Truly go up?" Does Stone even mention Piper? I seriously doubt it.

That we have to resort to going over all this minutiae with a fine-tooth-comb is unfortunate and for a lot of people will seem tedious and boring. But unfortunately that's often what has to be done to undo the damage that gets created by a carefully crafted soundbite approach to history as Stone engages in.

 

[Chris Will]

I just don't see how people take Oliver Stone seriously. He has been trying to re-write history and paint America as the bad guy for decades. His recent obsession with Putin and reluctance to call him out for the war when it first started is sickening. He claimed that the war was "part of an American plan" back in April. While I enjoy some of his movies I do not put any stock in his so-called "documentaries". They are full of nonsense and lies.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

1-How did Oswald get a job at the Texas School Book Depository to put him into position to shoot the President? Because a neighbor of Ruth Paine (whom Marina was living with) who worked at the Depository (Buell Frazier the man who drove Oswald to work that day) told her about job openings. That's not the result of government plotting or intelligence plotting, it's pure happenstance.

OK, on this there is pretty extensive discussion of Oswald being in Dallas and working at the book depository. It includes discussion of the route Oswald is said to have taken as he made his way downstairs after the shooting and who was in the stairwell at that time. This come into play in several ways. There was a woman that testified about being in the stairwell to the Warren Commision. The problem that Stone and the people in this documentary have with this is the woman told them she did not descend the stairwell alone, another woman was with her, and the Warren Commision did not want her testimony.

The primary thing about Oswald that the documentary is looking at is who was he and was he an intelligence asset. The people in the documentary including Stone seem to feel he was. The ease with which Oswald travelled to Russia and returned being a factor in this. So, they treat him as if he had a role in the conspiracy. It is interesting that they bring up two other trips Kennedy was supposed to make, one to Florida and one to Michigan. They bring up two more Oswald types that they claim likely would have been the "patsy" had assassination attempts been made on those trips. So, there was a Michigan patsy and a Florida patsy set to go. One of the potential patsies has a background quite similar to Oswald as an ex-Marine that trained Cubans.

I will go back to review what is said about Oswald and his book depository job.

I guess the thing I would point out here is the majority of the info presented in this documentary does not come from Stone, it is from several other people that appear on camera, documents, and people that participated in the Warren Commission and other attempts to investigate the assassination. None of it plays as crazy because they actually show documents on screen and cover things said by various people involved.

There is bizarre information presented. As an example showing the document where Gerald Ford changes the entry wound in Kennedy from his back to his neck. Ford crossed out and hand wrote that in. Also related to Ford, it is stated he himself contradicted the Warren Report telling the French president that there was a group that killed Kennedy, not Oswald alone.

My point is Stone is looking at what all these people have said and documents and drawing a conclusion, that does not make him a nut. This documentary is really where he, as a filmmaker, is laying out his case. I did not see his JFK picture in this way because it was a dramtic film, fictionalized and composed as a thriller. A fantastic one as thriller go in my opinion.

 

[Mr. Handley]

I've been fascinated with the JFK assassination ever since I was a kid. I've heard plenty of theories over the years and try to keep an open mind. I think there are enough holes in the "official" story to warrant questions. I also realize that we'll most likely NEVER find out what truly happened that day, which is too bad. In the meantime, I'll continue to be interested in the debate! Oh, and I also found the original Stone film to be a wonderful piece of movie making. Not to be confused with a documentary by any stretch. The casting was superb.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

I just don't see how people take Oliver Stone seriously. He has been trying to re-write history and paint America as the bad guy for decades. His recent obsession with Putin and reluctance to call him out for the war when it first started is sickening. He claimed that the war was "part of an American plan" back in April. While I enjoy some of his movies I do not put any stock in his so-called "documentaries". They are full of nonsense and lies.

Well, I guess it depends on what you mean as seriously. I'm not that wrapped up in the JFK assassination to the extent that I am hanging on his every word about it. I take him seriously as a filmmaker because he has made, in my opinion some great films.

I do not believe at all that he has been attempting to paint the US as the bad guy for years. In fact I think it is the opposite. He has in things like his Untold History pointed out bad things that were done in the name of empire building but this is not painting the US as the bad guy as we would need to get in line with a lot of other countries when it comes to that. His point is that in general Americans don't know history and how we came to be the country we are. That in truth is not this pretty story that is all about altruistic saint like men leading us to the promised land. No, we did get here the old fashioned way, killing our way here, using brutality, threats, and medaling in other countries affairs to benefit ourselves. That's not the US model, it is history's model for nation building and we used it the same way nations before ours did.

Stone's major point all along has been we should be able to speak about it and understand it as adults. This way we can understand the how and why of our place in the world and how other nations and people see us.

The Ukraine example is a good one in that the way that was sold to the American public by our media, all of our media not any particular outlet, was it was this shock that Putin had built up troops on the border and that he must have suddenly gone mad. Sure, they simplistically paint Putin as the bad guy because that is how we sell a war. You first have to get people to identify and hate the bad guy. There was pretty much nothing about how long we have known this war was coming and that it was going to happen and that yes, the United States was playing a part for decades in provoking it.

Our government want us to see it in the simplistic manner that most benefits what they wish to accomplish. It fits with a whole bunch of US goals. So, yes, war is bad, it is horrible Ukrainians are being killed, Putin did finally approve the attack and was the aggressor. However, how we got to that point was no shock and no surprise, we knew it was coming for a long time and we knew how it would best suit our goals. This was not a simple case of world leader goes insane and attacks a smaller country. However, this is mostly the way Americans believe it happened because this is how it was sold. It worked great and the US plays the good guy helping the heroic Zelenskyy fight the evil and insane (and sickly) Putin.

OK, but this was an entirely avoidable war, which at the start was exactly what Zelenskyy was saying.

So, I don't think Stone is at all in love with Putin, rather he tries to view him in a realistic manner. I certainly have no love for Putin but I also think our country did help to get him to commit to this war on Ukraine. Which could be the end of Putin as the leader of Russia if the chips fall a certain way.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

I've been fascinated with the JFK assassination ever since I was a kid. I've heard plenty of theories over the years and try to keep an open mind. I think there are enough holes in the "official" story to warrant questions. I also realize that we'll most likely NEVER find out what truly happened that day, which is too bad. In the meantime, I'll continue to be interested in the debate! Oh, and I also found the original Stone film to be a wonderful piece of movie making. Not to be confused with a documentary by any stretch. The casting was superb.

There are plenty of oddities that surround the event but as Stone himself has stated, no smoking gun. Basically, I think Stone's obsession with it is he believes it was a world altering event. He believes it led us down paths as a country we should not have gone down. There is a sadness and melancholy that hangs over this documentary at what we lost, not just as a country, but all over the world. We were, in that brief shining moment a country on the verge of perhaps changing everything and Stone believes, and shares the words Kennedy spoke, so that we may not only have peace in our time but in all times.

My father was in the Navy back then and found the killing of JFK a devastating moment. He was even more horrified when Bobby was killed. My father believed those events triggered a horrible change for our country and really it was a very emotional moment. I recall him saying when I was a boy "Something was taken from us that we can now never get back and it will change us as a country, probably, in terrible ways."

His "feeling" then was that Oswald likely did not act alone. I believe he thought this because he saw the killing of the Kennedy brothers as a crushing blow to America that so damaged the country and how we were seen in the world that it likely had to be the work of a group that wanted to see this happen. I do not think he would have suspected the CIA. When Bobby was killed I think that cemented in his mind that there was a "group" that wanted the Kennedys out of the way and this was likely because of how they may have changed the world if they had been able to serve the country for a longer period of time.

It's part of why I don't call Stone a nut. I think Stone feels much like my father did in that he felt the killing of the Kennedys took something from our country. Some better ideal of who we could be and the world we could create. I think if you lived through those moments they were shocking and changed how you saw things.

 

[David_B_K]

To me, Stone's agenda is more about rewriting the history of America during the Cold War to one in which America is the bad guy for even thinking there was anything bad or threatening about global communism and all the terrors it inflicted on the world (this indeed is why in one of his big documentaries, Stone tries to whitewash Stalin's responsibility for the Cold War and tries to resurrect the reputation of 1948 Presidential candidate Henry Wallace whose entire platform was basically the Soviet agenda). That is also the reason for his obsession that the assassination is somehow tied to "keeping America in Vietnam" which isn't borne out by serious historians either.

At the time of the assassination, Kennedy had just made the fateful decision that made Vietnam an American war when he authorized the military coup that overthrew South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem (and resulted in his murder though JFK had been naively hoping Diem would just be exiled). Kennedy did this without any rational thought as to the leadership capability of the generals, and in the process he also removed from the scene the one person who might have wanted to make his own deal with the North. Bobby Kennedy said in an oral history after the assassination no decision had been made to pull out of Vietnam. That's not saying JFK might have chosen to pull out eventually then make some bigger decisions to commit but the fact is that he had made no such decision at the time of his death.

You could be right, but I never saw Stone's JFK conspiracy theory as an over-all critique of the USA or a coddling of commies. IMO, the single most traumatic event of Stone's life was his tour of duty in Vietnam. He says that Platoon was based on his experiences. If so, it was nightmarish experience from which Stone may have never recovered. To me Stone's JFK is simply based on the thesis that Kennedy was going to end the US involvement in Vietnam and that the "military industrial complex" had to kill Kennedy in order to continue their war-mongering ways. For Stone, Kennedy was the hero who could have ended the Vietnam war and could have saved Stone from the trauma he experienced if only he had not been killed. This hero worship of Kennedy culminates in Garrison's embarrassing line about "avenging our fallen king" (a "Camelot" reference?)

As you said, there is zero evidence that Kennedy was planning to exit Vietnam. Once Stone committed himself to that belief, he had to believe a bunch of other nonsense to further that belief. The statement that "Kennedy was going to end the war in Vietnam" is now widely repeated as a fact by quite a few people. Stone has to believe the CIA, or others in government are behind it because they would be the ones to gain by "having a Texan in the White House!".

 

[Jack P]

The supreme irony is how Stone tries to manufacture a conspiracy theory in the sense of it being a "fascist coup" type or pseudo-right wing coup to get rid of JFK and put LBJ in power, but this requires ignoring the fact that on all *domestic* issues of the 1960s, LBJ was to JFK's left, not right. JFK was a fiscal conservative who had no use for the idea of a second New Deal (and who never would have gotten it passed in Congress anyway even if he had wanted one) that LBJ was obsessed with in his "Great Society" agenda. And scholars also are in full agreement that only LBJ could have broken the logjam on the major Civil Rights legislation passed in 1964 and 1965 because JFK simply didn't have that kind of clout (the Congressional leadership of his own party looked down on JFK as an upstart who had never done anything significant in all his years in the Senate.)

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

The supreme irony is how Stone tries to manufacture a conspiracy theory in the sense of it being a "fascist coup" type or pseudo-right wing coup to get rid of JFK and put LBJ in power, but this requires ignoring the fact that on all *domestic* issues of the 1960s, LBJ was to JFK's left, not right. JFK was a fiscal conservative who had no use for the idea of a second New Deal (and who never would have gotten it passed in Congress anyway even if he had wanted one) that LBJ was obsessed with in his "Great Society" agenda. And scholars also are in full agreement that only LBJ could have broken the logjam on the major Civil Rights legislation passed in 1964 and 1965 because JFK simply didn't have that kind of clout (the Congressional leadership of his own party looked down on JFK as an upstart who had never done anything significant in all his years in the Senate.)

I think there is a natural flow to how Stone comes to the conclusions he does. I don't feel he is attempting to manufacture a conspiracy, I think he is attempting to piece together evidence that points toward one. Saying he is trying to manufacture it is basically like saying he wants to intentionally deceive people, which I certainly don't think is the case. There is however, dot connecting. What I always believe you need to do, before you draw the line to connect this dot to that dot is to discover/show the evidence that those dots should be connected. There are strange things related to the JFK assassination and when you start piling them on top of each other i can see why people would question the "official story" but looking at the dots...while some are very intriguing, I am not certain you can draw some of the lines to connect them.

I know my father did not connect this assassination to the CIA. Now, this was in part because my dad served the country, was in the Navy, his father served the country in more than one branch and worked in intelligence. So, to my dad, and to a great extent to me, I find it very hard to believe that the CIA would assassinate an American president. Not as a blind spot but in general if you serve in the CIA, you very likely are committed to our nation in such a way that killing an American president would never be on your agenda and would be an anathema to you. Bottom line being that if you want to make that claim, the evidence would need to be huge and clear.

That said, I find putting Allen Dulles on the Warren Commision to be, mainly, a travesty. I am certain he was there to cover certain items up, to help create a speedy report, and to make sure the report read in a very specific way. Really, logically, there was no other reason to have him there. He brought to the commission an expert in cover-ups and honestly if you did not want the commission to appear suspicious, he should not have been on it. I think Dulles being on the commission is in part, why Stone looks to the CIA. In the documentary they state the CIA lobbied to get Dulles on the commission and LBJ was part of that effort. So, I do believe, and it makes a lot of sense, that Dulles was there to steer that report away from some things and toward a rapid conclusion. However, was Dulles there to hide CIA involvement in killing Kennedy? I would say that is pretty unlikely and I also don't believe putting a red flag like Dulles in place (whom Kennedy fired, providing motive) would be the best way to achieve that. Was he looking to keep certain things hidden, I would say, yes, absolutely. He was also likely there to help oversee information that they did uncover during the investigation and probably how that information was utilized. So, Dulles is a sore spot that causes obvious and reasonable suspicion.

The last 45 minutes or so of this documentary presents a bunch of evidence, documents, statements, that show Kennedy was very much looking at pulling our troops out of Vietnam no matter the outcome. It shows documentation and plays actual recordings of LBJ stating he disagreed with that choice and changed it. So, there was evidence that JFK wanted out of Vietnam.

 

[Jack P]

Dulles's presence had to do with one thing. Deflecting the matter of the fact the CIA and the Kennedy Administration had authorized assassination plots against Castro. LBJ was terrified of the idea that Oswald, a fanatical admirer of Castro who had tried to get into Cuba by going to the Cuban embassy in Mexico only a month beforehand, had done the killing at Castro's behest as retaliation for the assassination plots JFK had ordered. If the public believed Castro was responsible, then LBJ feared a public demand to take Castro out with an invasion of Cuba, which LBJ had no desire to do (especially as he was planning to run for a full term based on portraying himself as the "peace" candidate in contrast to alleged "warmonger" Barry Goldwater). Consequently, there was a deliberate attempt to downplay the role of an *ideological* motive behind Oswald's desire to kill Kennedy, and make it sound like his acts were more in the realm of an apolitical desire for seeking attention. This required downplaying the long trail of Oswald's ideological devotion to Marxism, and the Warren Commission also discovered from Marina that Oswald had earlier in 1963 with the same rifle attempted to murder fanatical right wing ex-General Edwin Walker by taking a shot at him while he was sitting at his desk in his house (it missed because Walker bent down just as the shot was fired). For someone like Oswald there was no fundamental difference between the Bircher ex-General and the centrist Democrat Kennedy. It also meant that those who knew about the assassination plots against Castro like Dulles, were going to make sure that never came up and that the Warren Commission staff responsible for doing the legwork of the investigation never knew.

The really sad thing about this purposeful whitewashing of Oswald's ideological motive in killing Kennedy is that it allowed a lot of media pontificators of the day to blame the assassination on some dark sinister side of the American psyche and it also caused a lot of false and unjust blame on the city of Dallas for something they had nothing to do with (in short, it was a reaction like the rush to blame Arabs for Oklahoma City before we discovered it was Timothy McVeigh). Once it was clear what the real nature of Oswald's likely motive was, which were political leanings that had *nothing* to do with anything in the American psyche, but those entirely rooted in a foreign ideology the United States was engaged in a global competition with, there was no longer any excuse for that kind of national shaming and self-flagellation.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

Here is a good discussion of this documentary. It is long but it delves into how the whole thing came together:

 

[Robert Saccone]

Something new from Paul Landis, secret service agent about how he put a bullet found in the car on the stretcher with Kennedy. Makes me wonder if its the bullet that Stone shows being planted on the stretcher in the hospital in the original film.

Former Secret Service Agent Makes Startling Claim About Bullet Found After Kennedy Assassination

'The Final Witness,' by former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, raises questions about the bullets fired in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

people.com

There is a NY Times article about this but it is behind a paywall so I posted the people link.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

I put all my trust in stories that go untold for 60 years and only emerge when the witness wants to sell a book.

 

[Jack P]

Landis's theory is again one of those pure garbage stories that makes zero sense when placed in the rational context of the *totality* of the evidence. Let's first start with how absurd the whole concept of a 'planted bullet' is. How could *anyone* on November 22, 1963 if they were part of a conspiracy have the slightest idea about the nature of bullet wounds and what was allegedly necessary to "frame" Oswald before any autopsy had been done, let alone *months* before a WC staff member named Arlen Specter came up with the Single Bullet Theory? That's not how things get plotted, that's the kind of scenario a buff comes up with when he tries to work backwards and presumes that the "plotters" have some omniscient awareness of what the "official" explanation afterwards is going to be. If there really had been some plot to frame Oswald the way you do it is have your plotter use *only* Oswald's rifle and not complicate things with any other weapons that supposedly some bright conspiracy buff like the infamous Robert Groden (the only guy O.J. Simpson's defense team at the civil trial could dredge up to insist that 30 pictures of O.J. wearing Bruno Magli shoes were fake!) can spot decades later!

I shouldn't even bother to note how amusing it is that Landis waited for his colleagues like Rufus Youngblood, Clint Hill etc. to all be dead before he started peddling his story.