JFK and the Broken Mirror of Innocence
by John Kendall Hawkins
Sing about Mahatma Gandhi
Sing of Martin Luther King
Sing Of Jesus Christ Almighty
And the brothers Kennedy
- Kris Kristoffereson, "They Killed Him" (1986)
Did "they" kill Camelot because he was a Man of Peace?
This is the tone and ponderance set in the first few minutes of Oliver Stone's latest update of the tragic events of November 22, 1963 -- JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass -- streaming on Showtime.
Did "we" kill him as the Jagger song back then suggests?
It's the same old question many Americans have asked, especially Christians, especially Vatican Catholics (Kennedy's brand of holy smoke), since the late days of the last paradigm, before God Himself was killed, the Canon was overthrown, and all things to humankind became relative. Like the late great poet and singer Jim Carroll put it, "Nothing is true / everything is permitted." And it's been like that for a while now; Twilight of the Idols. Die Gà ¶tterdà ¤mmerung. Heroes and Heroines dead. And here we are. At the barrel fire's dying embers, hungry egalitarian plebs just waiting to jump the first man who utters some Will Rogers bromide -- I never met a man I didn't like -- and they're on him in a busker gauntlet of Wokefulness fever, slapping him upside his head until he doesn't like anybody ever again.
We could blame Nietzsche for this. But he died a loon, after trying to rescue a horse being beaten in Turin, and going around slapping folks on the back, and asking passersby if they were content and liked the caricature of Reality he had created all around." Why bother beating his legacy silly? And he's got a point. Lots of caricature evident these End Stage Venal days of pre-AI man.
JFK Revisited asks us to consider the possibility that elements of our beloved government -- greatest show on Earth -- pulled the trigger and staged a coup that removed an unwanted power broker who had the kind of cajones to talk peace instead of war. The film begins with JFK delivering his famous televised 1963 American University speech on world peace to a youthful sun-drenched audience in DC. It comes several months after the Cuban Missile Crisis that was perilously close to leading to planetary nuclear annihilation. He tells us all, in his Cape Cod English, Khrushchev is not so bad, he's a man, he's just a man, and it's time to get rid of the WMD and work together. Kennedy begins his speech,
I have " chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on Earth peace. What kind of a peace do I mean? And what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children -- not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women, not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.
It sounded good. It sounds good today. Students and media figures at the event describe the speech as life-changing in its homage to humanity. Give peace a chance years before Yoko arrived on the scene, along with primal screams and inflatable Edvard Munch scream dolls, which sometimes get confused in my yippie-esque mind.
It sounded good. But can Cain and Abel cohabitate the planet without the white bebop sound? Cain doesn't want to share the watering hole. Second exile ahead. Where are the Cains today?
Oliver Stone partially answers the implied question by bringing forward to speak from Old Time, former Supreme Allied commander and Operation Overlord Dwight D. Eisenhower and his now-famous farewell speech to the American public of 1960, in which he explicitly warns Americans to be ever-vigilant against the rise of the Military-Industrial-Complex (The MIC). It's worth viewing a short snippet here to get the important gist:
Verily, not that Ike was any great shakes as a president, but he led the Normandy invasion and had been in charge of militarily freeing Europe, along with the Marshall Plan, in the first military-industrial partnership that saw Nazis welcomed to America and no doubt had Wall Street bulls seeing insane riches ahead. Who knows? You may be thinking as you watch. maybe GW Bush and former head of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, saw themselves as an Ike-Marshall pocket plan for the Middle East (and Afghanistan). This would fit with Stone's take on American politics.
JFK Revisited was released for the Cannes Film Festival (Showtime, November 2021). The film is directed by Stone and based on the 1992 non-fiction book Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case by James DiEugenio and on newly declassified evidence about the case. Stone explains his somewhat self-serving reason for releasing the film: He says, "[It's] an important bookend to my 1991 film. It ties up many loose threads, and hopefully repudiates much of the ignorance around the case and the movie." So, not overly-ambitious. But it adequately expresses the ideas in the book and sorts through the more recently released declassified information about the informational cover-up of the deed of November 22, 1963 in Dallas and beyond.
As of a few months ago, there is still some consternation regarding the release of the last documents on the case. What's the hold-up? Stone's film came out in November, just around the time when the Biden administration was continuing the stonewalling efforts of the CIA, FBI and Secret Service, by announcing another delay in the release of evidence -- due to "the pandemic" -- so his film doesn't incorporate the very latest information, which was eventually made public in December to critical disdain. In a December 2021 CNN piece, an obvious point is made about the PR 'look' of the continued obfuscation and stonewalling, by the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato, a leading scholar of the assassination.:
The reason it's so important is not so much that we're going to find a smoking gun that changes the entire theory of who killed Kennedy. The lack of transparency and the fact that getting these documents after 58 years is like pulling a whole mouthful of teeth -- it tells you why we have so many conspiracy theories. [my emphasis]
And it raises the question I've had for a while of why there's never been a redaction whistleblower -- some guy who's seen the goods, knows the scores. I dunno, maybe they get rubbed out, erased, rubberized. Get it?
Anyway, the film gets right into the Shot and processes through the now-familiar territory of challenged official findings -- specifically from the Warren Commission Report. JFK's peace speech at AU is cut short by a breaking announcement by teary CBS News presenter Walter Cronkite: JFK has been shot in Dallas. (He wouldn't choke up again so meaningfully until the summer of 1968 when he reported on the mayhem of the DNC in Chicago, describing it to the public as, "The Democratic Convention is about to begin in a police state. There just doesn't seem to be any other way to say it.") The forces of chaos at work. Or the MIC. A few minutes in, here comes Oliver Stone strolling across the grassy area opposite the book depository and casually telling the viewer the value of this film:
This is Dealey Plaza to this day remains a crime scene. In the years since the Warren Report, many significant investigations were made into the murder of President Kennedy. Each one revealed new facts and evidence that shed more light on what really happened here that day. Starting in 1975, after the Watergate scandal, Senator Frank Church conducted an investigation into the abuses and crimes of the FBI and CIA.
The Church group found plenty of flaws in the Warren report. We're told, "The intelligence agencies did all the wrong things if they really were looking for conspiracy or to find out who killed John Kennedy." Add in the Secret Service's behavior that day and it smells like a cover-up.
We've learned in recent decades and even days that the unspoken missions of the CIA, the FBI, and the Secret Service is, seemingly, often at odds with the stated purpose of their being. As recently as 2016, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies, were interfering in the internal politics of America's presidential election (a mandate no-no) by broadcasting (with the help of the MSM) an "assessment" that the Russians had "meddled" in the election, without any incontrovertible concrete evidence. The FBI, who told MLK to kill himself. The FBI, who knew about the Watergate slush funds and only revealed the trail to the Press after a peeved Deep Throat didn't get to replace a recently deceased Hoover as head of the agency and spit the dummy. The Secret Service, which just days ago, destroyed evidence in the Jan 6 farce that could have proved crucial to revealing Trump's criminal role in the events. As a result, we have foregone the opportunity to impeach him a third time (apparently, impeachment can be retroactive; imagine the cash cow ad revenue to be milked by the MSM!)
These are the reasons we develop conspiracy theories. The Deep State is dark. But Democracy has promises to keep. We mustn't go to sleep. And we mustn't go to sleep.
Stone's film goes down the list of how recently unredacted material fills in more gaps to our ignorance of events. High up on the list is The Magic Bullet-- so called, because a theory had to be developed around it, by the Warren Commission (Arlen Specter), to account for its seeming ability to hit two men (Kennedy and Connally) smashing bone, and performing ballistic acrobatics, while remaining pristine. No new talk of the physics is involved, but instead JFK Revisited brings us through the chain of custody regarding the bullet, wth newly redacted details reiterating already known evidence. It ain't pretty what is revealed.
The way the bullet was handled would have prevented it from being presented into evidence at a trial, since it could not be established beyond doubt that it was the same bullet discovered on a JFK's gurney at Parkland Hospital, hours later, by a guy pushing the gurney out of the way of the toilet to take a piss. And it became the main point of contention in the retracing of the crime. Pristine.
Another addition to the assassination declassification is further suppressed evidence that Oswald did not have time to go from shooting at the sniper's nest on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository to being confronted by a Dallas police officer in the second floor lunch room shortly thereafter. Depository worker Victoria Adams, witnessing the assassination from the fourth floor window over Dealey Plaza, says she rushed to get down to the tumultuous scene by way of a back staircase and did not encounter Lee Harvey Oswald, who would have to have been descending the stairs. We're told that new evidence establishes that the Warren Commission intentionally suppressed the corroborating statements of two witnesses to Adams's account, and that, declassification reveals, the Commission altered her statement to fit their anti-conspiracy "theory."
Here, we see convincing evidence that Oswald could not have made it down the stairs to the lunchroom, Coke in hand (pocket change would have to had figured into his planning), in time to encounter the cop, meaning he was set up and someone else took the shots, if any were taken from the sixth floor at all.
Then there are the autopsy and examination anomalies that occurred before and after the president's body was flown out of Dallas back to Washington, DC (Bethesda). Unredacted classified documents show that statements made by physicians attending JFK were altered -- specifically the throat wound, originally seen as an entry wound, meaning the shot came from the front -- to fit the Warren Commission account. Back at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, where JFK's corpse was delivered for autopsy, his body was dealt with by autopsy amateurs who inexplicably lost their examination notes, obfuscating the findings regarding entry and exit wounds.
No notes. No symphony. We got a fuckin John Cage event. Metronomes snoring in rhythm. Once again the public wanting just a little bit of light gets the ol' In/Out from Mr. Darkness.
As the title suggests, and Stone makes explicit, JFK Revisited is, in part, an attempt to vindicate the director's "findings" delivered in his 1991 conspiracy cult classic film, JFK. The film was heavily criticized for its "manipulation" of facts and its emotional excesses, famously summed up in the looped replay of Kennedy's head being blown apart by the magic bullet as Jim Garrison (played by Dances with Wolves) says, "Up and to the left," over and over again. Newsweek magazine flayed the film for its emotionality. On the other hand, many supporters admired Stone's stones for cinematically taking on a narrative with so many broken parts that it became, as the subtitle of JFK Revisited suggests, a vision Through the Looking Glass, with all kinds of Alice in Wonderland features that have very slowly taken generations to coalesce into an approximation of "truth" as that catastrophic event gets placed into a larger historical pattern of Deep State deceit and backstage decision-making.
Stone spoke to a generation that was chock full of activists, people willing to protest daily against The War (which is to say, against The Man's authority), who, in the case of the Yippies, refused to take the f*cker serious at all, throwing dollars down in the Wall Street pig pit to watch 'em wallow, and negotiating the levitation of the war machine's headquarters. Some of us thought JFK was the mother of all conspiracies, and a goodly number of us wasted our lives trying to get to the bitter truth of who done it. When we hear the MSM decry dissidents as conspiracy theorists today, we hear a rebuke to our dying generation with its fewer and fewer voices -- of Reason. And who doesn't want speed the snot bags of Chris Hayes when he carries on like a millionaire martyr for the Demos?
But Pearl Harbor came first, not JFK. Many people of my generation were unaware that there was a serious set of doubts cast about the way the US entered World War II. Many folks were enjoying the fruits of FDR's New Deal labors and wanted nothing to do with the war raging in Europe. They still had long memories of the War to End All Wars (WWI) and had suffered horrifically during the Depression that followed. If you ever read The Grapes of Wrath, you know that the real enemy at that time was Poverty. But poverty isn't a money-maker. Did we know ahead of time? It was a question even back then. The first crack in the mirror of innocence, perhaps, brought on by the madness of power that came with the near annihilation events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Indeed, RAND warplanner Daniel Ellsberg suggests as much in his descriptions of the worldview held by generals and scientists looking to go from a fission bomb to a fusion bomb, as well as his observation that the film Dr. Strangelove was "essentially a documentary," all laid out in his 2019 book, The Doomsday Machine).
It was known as Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory. It was put forward by a reporter named John T. Flynn in a pamphlet titled The Truth About Pearl Harbor, wherein he argues that
Roosevelt and his inner circle had been plotting to provoke the Japanese into an attack on the U.S. and thus provide a reason to enter the war since January 1941 and that the sanctions which the Roosevelt Administration had placed on Japan during that year were intended for that purpose - the oil embargo, specifically - whose lifting was attached to conditions it knew Japan could never agree to. [Wiki]
Flynn didn't like the New Deal policies of FDR much at all. Today, that would be enough to qualify him as a conspiracy theorist by the MSM -- probably the same folks who made sure his Wikipedia entry reads that way. But, from my read of his oeuvre, aside from his distaste for New Deal policies, Flynn was a lefty with publishing connections to Harper's and The New Republic. He was part of an America First isolationist group, but his AF was a far cry from the barking mad MAGA dogmatists who are more sentimentalists ("Nothing is the way it used to be -- and never was." - Will Rogers) than isolationists. Flynn had also written previously about how proto-MIC elites had dragged America into WWI.
Flynn's book described a system wherein it did not matter which party was in office with respect to the machinery of hegemony. As the late CIA rogue operative Duane Clarridge put it, "Get used to it world. If our national security is threatened, we're gonna do it"If you don't like it, lump it." Flynn made fun of this kind of prevalent attitude:
The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.
This sounds sensible and ahead of its time. Flynn, like Stone later, takes heat during his career and its remembrance for his Christopher Hitchens-like reversal of political allegiances, but his early stuff is sound lefty ideology.
So, there's JFK and Pearl Harbor. Frank Church's committee in the the 70s teased out more information about JFK's assassination and came, after review of the flaws of the Warren Commission, to assert that a conspiracy had taken place. He went further, later, in expressing his terror at the rise of the Surveillance State, and how even back in the 70s the Deepsters had amassed powers of intrusion so tremendous that if unrestrained,
There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.
Here is his full admonition on Meet the Press in 1975:
Fast-forward to 2019 and Edward Snowden's memoir on the lam, Permanent Record. Mission: Accomplished.
Over the years the MSM has eroded our confidence in what we can believe about national and foreign politics. They have become propagandists; lapdog stenographers. In 2016, when they began to bring on the likes of liar-liars like James Clapper and John Brennan, voices from the dark and dreary, you knew you were in trouble. Consultants! And then the war against small, independent journalism started to dry up, become especially vulnerable to financial pressures. PayPal decides who reports what. We indie-types were suddenly no better off than buskers -- getting by for now, as long as we weren't knocked off that corner or Dylan went out of style. Gotterdammerung! if you strummed the wrong tunes about origins or vaccines or missing money". Remember, your tiny family jewels are in a little leather bag you hang on the bedpost with your dreamcatcher. Like Paul Simon (when was the last time you heard him cited?) used to say, "Preserve your memories / It's all that's left you." N'est-ce pas?
Some mock the existence of the so-called Deep State. See the name itself as a litmus test of your sanity and conspiratorial negaclivities. They fear being near you, looking at you like you might be one of those folks who fall through sudden trap doors in the sidewalk and go off down a chute at any moment to where the QAnon corn kids go, stuck inside, immobile, in some cubby hole beneath a pizza shop owned by a Stephen King monster answers to the name Turd Blossom, wears a starched white Che tee, serves up anti-Reality pies.
But the Deep State has proven to be as American as apple pie. Deep dish apple pie. A la mode, if you will, to quote Tom Waits from the classic and ever-relevant Closing Time. It partially gained respectability as a term when it showed up on PBS under the Bill Moyers catalog of political wonders. Moyers came right out and said it: The Deep State is what Ike is referring to when he said Military Industrial Complex. It's an updated term borrowed, appropriately, from a John Le Carre' novel. A blurb at a PBS station describes "The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight This Way":
Mike Lofgren, a congressional staff member for 28 years, joins Bill Moyers to talk about what he calls Washington's "Deep State," in which elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. "It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion of our civil liberties and perpetual war," Lofgren tells Moyers.
It's worth a watch. Just be careful where you walk. Because once you know; they may know you know. You know, from your online activity. Your timeline. Your beloved credit card purchases and subscriptions to lefty-leaning wonder worlds. The PBS take on the "Deep State" with Bill Moyers is calm and rational and sweet. We can handle its meta-governmental truths as something the next election cycle can sort out.
Pearl Harbor behind us JFK conspiracists and rolling Pearl Harbors ahead. (How's that Grateful Dead song go?)
There was the minor 9/11 of 2000 when we learned that our national electoral process was nothing more than a clown pie-throwing contest. Another disruption created for nefarious purposes (Black felonies that didn't exist, housed in databases controlled by Checkpoint, board directed by Richard Armitage, signatory to the Project for a New American Century, with its cautionary worry that "absent a new Pearl Harbor" its ambitious neoconservative vision for Pax Americana would not be attained). Then there was 9/11. Bin. Bang. Boom.
Many of us have spent way too much time since 9/11, according to Noam Chomsky, our beloved (see Socrates) public gadfly who thinks we should concentrate on saving ourselves from nukes, climate change and the failure of democracy. (Global Trends says democracy is already kaput but may return blithely by 2040 with American 'know-how' leading the way.) Many of us think that 9/11 was an "inside job," meaning that at the very least, and as an internal CIA report explicitly, red flag communications to the White House in the months leading up to the pearl harbor event were deliberately and/or incompetently fumbled by guardians of our collective well-being -- especially singled out was CIA Counterterrorism Center Chief Cofer Black, who, promoted up, went on to become Ambassador-at-Large and to create the black sites for CIA renditions, and to design the CIA's war in Afghanistan and to end up on the board of Ukraine's corrupt Burisma Gas Holdings. Busy Guy. And there are lots of busy guys out there -- rogues who foment and fume, who think they're part of some kind of Fight Club. Remember how that film ended, with a view from a dark room of skyscrapers falling all around in their own footprints?
More rolling pearl harbors. The Internet, created by the Pentagon, gifted to the public, repossessed by the Pentagon, made into a battlefield that soldiers must own. Assange becomes "a non-state enemy combatant" aligned with our Klingon archenemies the Russians. Indeed, Aussie Assange biographer Andrew Fowler has described how the US government have referred to Assange hacks as "Pearl Harbor" events (see my recent Assange piece). The DIA has a right to information about everybody on the battlefield. National Security. See Edward Snowden, Permanent Record. Your Facebook timeline could be manipulated into a "dossier" that gets you (and your mates) fingered for future f*ck-withs by algorithmic goon squads for The Man.
And even more rolling pearl harbors. Synthetic Biology is here. (See my report.) The US government is creating new molecules to 'compete' with Nature for supremacy. New biology. New viruses on purpose to keep ahead of enemies. Fauci's gift of US tax dollars to the Wuhan people to beat the bat sh*t out of viruses with gain-of-function speed gloves until they got real angry and virulent enough to go on a reign of terror if they ever got out. (Think: Cagney, White Heat.) Yes, I'm saying it. The Wuhan origin story is a pearl harbor waiting to unfold, and a harbinger of things to come. The Fight Club is busy with The Fun. Check out the Havana Syndrome that's even reached the MSM, which means, of course, its covering for spook sh*t. Again. More rolling pearl harbors ahead than you can shake a snake's fist at. And when They get to the Hivemind -- when everyone has to log on to a centralized Internet in order to conduct necessary daily functions, such as paying your water bill (you are 65% water, reader) -- well, you best be off the grid, boy.
Yeah. Oliver Stoned's JFK still has some groove rubble worth toking on. In the end, once JFK Revisited makes the case that the president's murder was a conspiracy, Stone's Jim Garrison, played by Dances With Wolves, asks the Question through Donald Sutherland, the hippie tank driver from Kelly's Heroes, the obvious lefty question I heard so often through bong smoke in my youth:
That's a real question, isn't it? Why? The how and the who is just scenery for the public. Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the Mafia keeps them guessing like some kind of parlor game, prevents them from asking the most important question. Why? Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited? Who has the power to cover it. Who?
For Stone, the Answer is ever closer to discernment. Stone believes that gradual unveiling by way of declassification is getting us incrementally closer to a grand revelation about how our government really works, why and for whom.
It goes back to Ike's warning.
[FLASHBACK! Donald Sutherland goes on to play the Pointing Former Lefty at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (which is really Mind Snatchers, since technically no change in bodies but minds). So, there's not much time left. And that's an old movie. Wait. Who are you?)
JFK Revisited is a slight film by Stone standards, and not a major set of revelations, even with the newly declassified evidence. But still, especially for those of us who have watched Stone's JFK multiple times, worth viewing, as it ties in nicely with his classic epic of conspiracy-mindedness -- for ill and for the good. Truly, still relevant, as we fight amongst ourselves for control of the narrative. My grandfather used to say, If you're not a little wacky today, there's something wrong with you. I would add to that: If you're not a little conspiracy-seeking in your thinking today, you're f*cking stupid. And I majored in philosophy. You?
Watch out for The Umbrella Man on a sunny day and remember that when it rains it pours. Always take it with a grain of salt. And if you're gonna jump puddles, don't wear a pinafore.
3
2
2
