Something for every conspiratorialist

Rating: 4/10 (22 June 2005)

As much as I could gather, according to Oliver Stone in this movie, the assassination of JFK (as well as RFK and MLK) seems to have been carried out by a conspiratorial network consisting of people drawn from:
a) disgruntled right-wing extremists in this country; b) fanatical Cuban nationalist mercenaries; c) the FBI; d) the CIA; e) the Dallas police department; f) the more secret echelons of the conventional military; g) members of Kennedy's cabinet, including then Vice President Lyndon Johnson; h) organized crime; and i) Big Business.
The reasons for the assassination include (but aren't limited to):
a) punishment for Kennedy's backing out during the Bay of Pigs; b) Kennedy being soft overall on Communism, and c) being too tough on organized crime; d) his perceived desire to ratchet down the cold war, including e) his plan to end US involvement in Viet Nam, which would in turn f) deprive the military of a much desired war and concomitant inflated military budget, which would then in turn g) deprive Big Business of lucrative military contracts.
Lee Harvey Oswald is portrayed as a CIA operative who was only peripherally involved in the plot, but was then used by the masterminds as the "patsy." Oswald was particularly attractive for this role because, as part of earlier operations, he had developed a pro-Communist persona that had allowed him to infiltrate and spy on left-leaning groups. Among his assignments was even a fake defection to the Soviet Union. After the assassination, Oswald himself was assassinated before he could talk. Thus the murder of the president could be publicly attributed to the lone action of a pinko wing-nut, the dual results being the elimination of a pesky, non-ball-playing head of state and further fanning up of the flames of furor against the Evil Empire and its world-wide pawns.
Was there a conspiracy? We are left with no doubt that Oliver Stone thinks so. If there was a conspiracy, is this version correct? Again, we must conclude that Oliver Stone thinks it is. At one point in the movie, Kevin Costner even says (parapharsed) that "What we do here now is only the beginning. It may be 25 or 30 years before someone finally finds the real truth." I'm sure it's entirely coincidental that that time frame would take us right up to 1991, when this movie came out.
He's casting a pretty wide and implausible net here. It is implausible, if for no other reason, just because there's no way you could get all of these disparate people to work together, even if they were united in mutual hatred of Kenedey's guts. Petty personality differences and territorial squabbles would inequitably doom any such ambitious effort. Not just in the JKF assassination, but in general, humanity is saved from these kind of large scale conspiracies by its own inborn vainglorious proclivities.