Why Oliver Stone’s JFK is the greatest lie Hollywood ever told

Under the watchful gaze of the Lincoln Memorial, Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner – Hollywood’s then-good and true leading man) meets a mysterious whistleblower known only as “X” (Donald Sutherland). Garrison is the New Orleans district attorney; X is a former black ops man-turned-deep throat. (“One of those secret guys in the Pentagon,” X says.) Garrison is investigating the assassination of President John F Kennedy – shot on November 22 1963, at the Dealey Plaza in Dallas – and determined to prove that Lee Harvey Oswald was just “a patsy” in a bigger plot.

“You’re close,” X tells him. “Closer than you think.”

In Oliver Stone’s three hours-plus JFK, this scene is the towering dramatic centrepiece: a blistering 15-minute monologue that blows apart the conspiracy that killed Kennedy – tensions between Kennedy and the CIA; Kennedy’s soft stance of communism and intention to pull out of Vietnam; the Cubans, the Mob, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all gunning for Kennedy from the shadows; the teams of shooters brought in to kill him in a “turkey shoot” (with one shooter, of course, placed on the grassy knoll); and the “fiction” of the Warren Report, the official investigation into Kennedy’s murder.

“Very strange things were happening, and your Lee Harvey Oswald had nothing to do with them,” says X, before asking the all-important questions that underpin Stone’s film: “Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited? Who has the power to cover it up?”

The scene encapsulates JFK perfectly: densely packed with information; gripping from the start to finish; and a dizzying whirlpool of ever-deepening conspiracies. It’s also, rather disappointingly, hokum. In retelling the story of Jim Garrison, still the only man to bring a trial in the murder of Kennedy, and the conspiracy he claimed to have uncovered, Stone’s JFK treads the deliberately-blurred lines between half-truths, speculation, and bold-faced nonsense.

Michel J Gagné is a humanities lecturer at Champlain College St-Lambert, Quebec. He calls himself a historian of ideas and “a recovering conspiracist”. He’s written about how he was duped by the film when he first saw it back in 1991.

“People my age just took the film as fact – hook, line and sinker,” he tells me.

The JFK assassination was the actual crime of the century. It changed America, and the events that surrounded it feel relevant today: civil rights, political division, fake news, deep suspicion of government.

“To this very day, JFK represents the unfulfilled promise of America,” says Tom Stone, a professor at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University. “This is the guy who seemed to aspire to move beyond militarism, beyond racism, beyond complacency. There are all sorts of ways in which the real America has failed to live up to our ideals. That gap between aspiration and reality is a reason why Kennedy is still an important figure to this day.”

More than just historical inaccuracy for Hollywood’s sake, JFK has an agenda. But did Oliver Stone have a greater responsibility to the known facts surrounding Kennedy? Is JFK a conspiracy to cover up the truth?

Tom Stone began teaching courses on John F Kennedy around the time the film was released. Each version of his course has begun with a screening of JFK.

“It’s a very well made movie and the best introduction to the conspiracy theories – even if the rest of the semester is spent poking holes in it,” he says. “I believe that nobody should trust any one source about the assassination. Everyone comes to it with an agenda. It’s easy to manipulate and cherry-pick because the evidence is contradictory and all over the place. It’s like the Bible. You can start plucking stuff out to prove just about anything.”

Dr Ken Drinkwater, a lecturer and conspiracy expert from Manchester Metropolitan University, says he keeps “an open mind” about JFK.

“It’s about understanding how conspiracies can be formed,” he says. “You can take a belief system you already have, and it’s adapted by the information you think is more pertinent to your belief.”

That seems true of both Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone. Stone first learned of Garrison’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins, after a chance meeting with its publisher at a Cuban film festival in 1988. By then, Garrison had been written off as a kook. Even the conspiracy community saw Garrison as an embarrassment: his farcical trial of respected and popular New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw had damaged their cause. Garrison’s revisionist account was just as hokey.

“The book was riddled with striking inaccuracies and outright lies,” wrote Clay Shaw biographer Donald H Carpenter.

Stone purchased the rights for $250,000 and hired Zachary Sklar, the editor of Garrison’s book, to co-write the screenplay.

“The movie is kind of quoting itself,” says Gagné. “There’s some of this circular reasoning going on. Sklar wrote the screenplay based on a book that he himself had heavily edited.”

Stone also snapped up Jim Marrs’s Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, a catch-all book on JFK conspiracies, and enlisted Robert Groden, Larry Howard and L Fletcher Prouty as advisors – all conspiracists. Prouty was one of the inspirations behind X. He was an Air Force chief-turned-conspiracy whistleblower who associated with Liberty Lobby, a Right-wing group with links to Holocaust denial.

“People who worked with him thought he was deeply paranoid,” says Gagné. “A lot of stuff in his books is paranoid anti-CIA speculation.”

Oliver Stone wrote the introduction for Prouty’s book, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F Kennedy.

“They didn’t consult mainstream historians,” says Gagné. “Robert Dallek, for example – no one asked him to be an advisor, even though he’s one of the foremost experts on JFK. They used people from the fringe.”

According to Patricia Lambert’s False Witness, a damning book on the Garrison-Shaw trial, Oliver Stone went into top-secret mode for JFK. He dubbed the film “Project X”, made the crew sign non-disclosures, and swept his office for bugs.

He also paid $50,000 to film on the sixth floor of the Book Depository, where Oswald shot Kennedy, and restored the “grassy knoll” area to how it looked in 1963. But his portrayal of Jim Garrison and Clay Shaw (played in the movie by Tommy Lee Jones) was less authentic, and more problematic: Garrison as a lone crusader of American justice, and Clay – a proven innocent man – as a smug, sexually deviant conspirator.

The real Garrison is often described as “larger than life” and hugely charismatic – but also bullish, narcissistic and manipulative.

“I believe the real Garrison was kind of a charlatan who would do anything to win and didn’t mind a bit of publicity,” says Tom Stone. “Anyone who sees the movie and thinks they know what the real Jim Garrison was like… it’s almost funny how wrong that is.”

Garrison investigated a former pilot named David Ferrie (played by Joe Pesci), an oddball who wore a homemade wig and stick-on eyebrows, and linked Ferrie to Clay Shaw.

Garrison accused Shaw of using the alias “Clay Bertrand”, a mystery man whom a shyster DA named Dean Andrews said contacted him about Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman in the film). Andrews later confessed he invented the story.

Garrison claimed that Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald had conspired to shoot Kennedy as part of a “homosexual thrill kill”. But there was no proven link between the three men. Later, Garrison claimed Shaw was a CIA agent, convinced by a story he’d seen on an Italian communist newspaper, Paese Sera – a story reportedly planted by the KGB. The CIA-killed-Kennedy theory continues to this day.

“Garrison deduced a theory, then he marshalled his facts,” wrote Patricia Lambert. “And if the facts didn’t fit, he’d say they had been altered by the CIA.” 

David Ferrie died in February 1967 (not murdered for confessing, as depicted in the film, but killed by a brain aneurysm), and Garrison arrested Clay Shaw the following month. 

An insurance salesman named Perry Russo claimed that he’d witnessed Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald plotting to kill JFK at a party. But he only made the claims after being subjected to hypnosis and the “truth serum”, sodium pentothal. Russo is omitted from the film. Also absent is a crackpot investigator who made up evidence and most of the case for the defence.

Unsurprisingly, Stone met resistance in New Orleans from people who were involved with the real trial. A defense attorney who represented Shaw told Oliver Stone that “he did not believe Garrison acted in good faith.” Rosemary James, a reporter who covered the trial, wrote: “I know for a fact that Garrison deliberately proceeded with a fraudulent case against Clay Shaw.” Harold Weisberg, a veteran assassination investigator, leaked an early draft of the script to The Washington Post, creating more high-profile criticism.

Stone defended himself in interviews by saying “I’ve created a counter-myth to the official one – is that so bad?” But he would also call himself a “cinematic historian” and hoped to be remembered as “a good historian as well as a good dramatist”.

Indeed, Stone’s documentary-style filmmaking does pertain to absolute truth. Newsreel-like grainy, black-and-white handheld scenes blend with real archive footage, such as Walter Cronkite on live TV announcing to the nation that Kennedy has died, and the Zapruder film, amateur footage of Kennedy’s motorcade passing through Dealey Plaza.

Reclaiming History, a 1,500-page doctrine debunking JFK conspiracies, by American attorney and author Vincent Bugliosi, includes a searing chapter on the film.

“The problem with Stone is not, really, that he egregiously fictionalised the Kennedy assassination,” said Bugliosi. “It’s that he tried to convince everyone he was telling the truth.”

Stone said he wanted JFK to be like Japanese classic Rashomon, by offering up different perspectives, most of which have Oswald, Jack Ruby (Brian Doyle-Murray), and Clay Shaw wandering in and out. “It explores all the possible scenarios of why Kennedy was killed,” Stone told the New York Times.

Stone does throw in lots of theories: Oswald was framed for the murder of police officer JD Tippit, killed 45 minutes after Kennedy; a famous photograph of Oswald posing with his rifle was faked; witnesses at the Dealey Plaza heard six shots, not three; others saw suspicious men at the grassy knoll; Oswald was a poor shot; expert shooters couldn’t replicate the time of Oswald’s three shots at Kennedy. Different perspectives perhaps, but a unifying “truth”: it was conspiracy.

Bugliosi dismantles the film’s many claims with convincing ferocity. For instance, ten witnesses put Oswald on the scene of Tippit’s murder; Oswald was actually a sharpshooter; one of the expert shooters didn’t just replicate but improved on Oswald’s shooting; only one person at Dealey Plaza claimed to hear six shots, while 136 people heard three; and many witnesses quoted by Stone were unreliable.

According to Bugliosi, there’s also key evidence left out: “Evidence like Oswald carrying a large brown bag into the Book Depository Building on the morning of the assassination, his fingerprints and palm print being found at the sniper’s nest, his being the only employee of the building to flee the building after the shooting, the provable lies he told during his interrogation… Stone presented none of this to his audience.”

The claim that Kennedy would pull out of Vietnam is also misleading. Memo NSAM 273, which the film claims Lyndon Johnson signed to give the military its war, thereby reversing Kennedy’s position just days after his death, was actually drafted before Kennedy’s death.

“I don’t think anyone could have known for sure what Kennedy was going to do about Vietnam,” says Tom Stone. “The idea they took him out because of Vietnam is based on a false assumption.”

JFK’s biggest myth may be Kennedy himself, who was not a saint-like figure of progressive politics. Kennedy was late to embrace the civil rights; had mob connections; he was anti-communist; and had multiple affairs.

“He was a morally fraught person,” says Gagné. “One big criticism is that a lot of his decisions were made with his eye on opinion polls. He did not have a deep ideology.”

Still, Stone’s film is a persuasive masterclass. See the moment in which Costner’s Garrison explains the “magic bullet theory”.

As Garrison details, a single bullet caused a total of seven wounds between Kennedy and Governor John Connally, sat in front of Kennedy in the motorcade. To achieve this, the bullet must have stopped in mid air and made several unfathomable turns – through Kennedy’s neck, and Connally’s back, chest, wrist, and leg. Surely there had to be more bullets, and therefore more shooters. But that isn’t what the Warren Report says. The magic bullet was the creation of conspiracists.

“When I read the Warren Report, I realised there is no zig-zagging bullet,” says Gagné. “Instead there’s a bullet that goes in a straight line and straight through both men. That’s when I realised Oliver Stone was manipulating information.”

In the film’s closing scene, Costner delivers a stirring speech about the dishonesty at the heart of America. He accuses every law agency within spitting distance of the conspiracy. The real Garrison didn’t mention the CIA. In fact, he only averaged one day per week in court and wasn’t he there to cross-examine Shaw. He was also absent when Shaw was acquitted in 54 minutes. But is the rousing Americana just fair dramatic licence?

“I think the film can be treated too harshly,” says Ken Drinkwater. “It’s entertainment and based on some facts. There is a licence for a filmmaker to present more of an exaggeration. If it was a documentary pointing to Lee Harvey Oswald not being the lone assassin, it wouldn’t have sold as many box office tickets!”

The film did convince audiences about conspiracies (me included). Its cultural impact turned political: George Bush established the Assassination Records Review Board, which led to the release of more than 3,000 documents in 2017, though there were no major revelations.

“I’m sure if there was a smoking gun in the files it was accidentally shredded and flushed,” laughs Tom Stone.

But as Ken Drinkwater points out, conspiracies have been proven in the past, such as the MK Ultra mind-control tests; or Kennedy signing off an attempted assassination of Field Castro, which is now widely known. And there are still mysteries to be solved around JFK and files still unavailable. Both Tom Stone and Michel Gagné cite a trip which Oswald took to Mexico City weeks before the assassination. Oswald made mysterious visits to the Cuban and Soviet Embassies. Did someone get in Oswald’s ear?

“Just because Oswald was the only shooter, doesn’t mean there wasn’t some small-scale conspiracy to put him up to it,” says Stone. “I still think there are legitimate concerns about influence. If we could ever know who said what to Oswald in Mexico City, we’d have a solution to the case.”

With JFK, Oliver Stone may have become the new Jim Garrison. Gagné agrees: “He used a lot of the same methods, cherry-picking evidence to prove what he assumed at the beginning was true. He doesn’t seem to notice that historians exist. Maybe he thinks they’re part of the cover-up.”

And certainly, Oliver Stone knows the power of film. In the Clay Shaw trial, he screens the Zapruder film – just as the real Garrison had. The footage is gut-churning: Kennedy’s head bursts open, Jackie screams silently. As Costner’s Garrison says: “A picture speaks a thousand words, doesn’t it?”

Michel J. Gagné’s podcast Paranoid Planet can be found here