Town
Hall was packed— some 1200 people. The event was
called immodestly “Hollywood and History,”
and sponsored by the Nation Magazine. It was supposed
to be a no-holds-barred debate about whether Oliver
Stone’s 1991 movie, JFK was fact or fiction, according
to Victor Navasky, the Nation ‘s editor-in-chief,
who was moderating it. The hero of Stone’s movie
was none other than Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner),
the New Orleans District Attorney who had tried a New
Orleans business man named Clay Shaw for conspiring
to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Even though
a jury acquitted Shaw, the movie depicts Garrison unraveling
a CIA-backed conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Since I had
debunked Garrison in a New Yorker piece, Navasky had
asked that I confront Stone in a debate, and I agreed
to participate. The other participants on stage were
Norman Mailer, who had just written Harlot’s Ghost,
a roman a clef novel suggesting the involvement of a
rogue faction of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination,
and Nora Ephron, a film writer whose experience on her
movie Silkwood furnished a perspective on how Hollywood
treated reality-based stories.
Oliver Stone arrived promptly at 7:30 PM, accompanied
by two comely assistants, Jane Rusconi, his chief researcher
on JFK, who sat next to him on stage, and Kristina Hare,
his production assistant, who sat in the first row.
He received an almost ten-minute long standing ovation.
It was clearly his audience.
Navasky opened the discussion with a well-received joke.
He asked “Will all of you out there that think
you yourself don’t belong on this panel please
stand up?” No one did.
Mailer spoke first. He began by saying that the JFK
assassination should be “seen not as history but
as a myth in which the gods warred and a god fell.”
He remarked about Stone, “Of course, like many
a movie man beforehand, he mislabeled the product. He
did not make cinematic history, and in fact, to hell
with that. He's dared something more dangerous. He entered
the echoing halls of the largest paranoid myth of our
time: the undeclared national belief that John Fitzgerald
Kennedy was killed by the concentrated forces of maligned
power in the land.”
Three years earlier, Mailer had formed what he called
the “Dynamite Club,” consisting of two initial
members, me and Don Delillo, who had written the novel
Libra about Oswald. He gradually expanded the club to
include other conspiracy investigators, including Jim
Hougan, the author of Spooks, Bernard “Bud”
Fensterwald, who had founded his own “Assassiuatio
Archives and Research Center,” and even, for one
session in Washington, G. Gordon Liddy, the organizer
of the infamous Watergate break-in. At the meetings,
most of which were at Mailer’s house in Brooklyn
or at my apartment in Manhattan, he sketched out his
view that JFK was killed as part of an apocalyptical
struggle to change history, so I was not totally surprised
at his deification of Kennedy as a “god.”.
Next came Nora Ephron. “I'm not here to talk about
JFK, per se,” she began, “but about what
it is like to have written a movie based on something
that happened.” She then provided immensely entertaining
anecdotes about the problems she had in Silkwood which
showed that movies often need to varnish a factual story
with a layer of fictive embellishment, such as adding
“spoons at a table.” Her account greatly
amused everyone, although it evaded the issue of Stone’s
movie.
So it fell to me to point out that Stone’s JFK
had diverged so far from the facts of the case that
it was nothing short of an organized misrepresentation
of reality. I had prepared the night before by jotting
down the issues on two 3x5 cards. The first card dealt
with the general problem of mixing fact and fiction,
It read: “Although they may aim at the same purpose
of finding truth, non-Fiction and fiction are two distinct
forms of knowledge. The writer of non-fiction is limited
by the universe of discoverable fact. He cannot make
up what he does not know-- no matter how strong his
intuition or suspicion. The writer of fiction knows
no such boundary: He can fill in whatever gaps exist
with his imagination.”
The second card dealt with the falsity of one specific
scene in JFK in which David Ferrie (played by Joe Pesci),
Garrison’s original suspect, confesses to Garrison
that he had been involved in the assassination along
with the CIA, Lee Harvey Oswald (played by Gary Oldman),
and Clay Shaw (played by Tommy Lee Jones.) Ferrie is
then found mysteriously dead. I noted on the card, “In
the factual universe, Ferrie confessed to no such thing.
Contrary to Stone’s version, Garrison never claimed
that he made any confession. In his own book Trail of
the Assassin. Garrison acknowledged that Ferrie insiste//d
that he had no connection whatsoever with Oswald, Shaw
or the assassination. So the key scene in JFK is pure
invention. Yet, the audience has no way of knowing this,
and once the fictional confession is added, the audience
is irretrievably misled.”
But now surveying the audience, I realized I needed
a more winning approach. So I took another tact. “
I'm going to be in the minority,” I began, “but
I believe there is a difference between nonfiction and
fiction. I don't believe the difference is a trivial
difference.” I said Stone has every right to present
whatever view he considers valid--or even entertaining--in
a work of fiction. Everyone else does it. And as such,
it may contain much truth in it, and it may look likes
a news documentary but it cannot be considered non-fiction
because it blends in fictional characters and fictional
episodes. But, as we all know, a real event also happened
in New Orleans in 1967.”
I then pointed out that in that event “there was
a flagrant abuse of prosecutorial power by Jim Garrison.
Over a dozen people were arrested or charged with a
crime-- although they were never prosecuted. Three were
members of the press-- Walter Sheridan of NBC News,
David Chandler of Life magazine, and Richard Townley
of WSDU-TV. Arrest warrants were issued for them on
charges of bribery because they charged Garrison was
fabricating evidence Three were members of Garrison's
own staff. They were charged with larceny for leaking
Garrison's purported evidence to the press. Six were
potential witnesses. They claimed Garrison asked them
to perjure themselves or plant evidence in return for
legal favors or cash. He also arrested someone called
Edgar Eugene Bradley, charging him with "conspiracy
to kill JFK." The reason: The arrest was just a
desperate effort to divert public opinion. After Bradley--whoever
he is--was released; Garrison forgot about him. The
assistant DA said "it was a mistake". You
won't find Bradley's name in the movie JFK.”
At this point, having appealed to the civil liberties’
side of the Nation audience, I was not booed. So I proceeded
to make the points I had prepared.
Stone was the final speaker. He lumbered over to the
podium, and responded, “I obviously would like
to address some of your questions, Mr. Epstein, but
we'll wait till afterward.”He said that his film
represented the mythic “ common man: Jim Garrison
risking a comfortable life to do battle with the forces
of overwhelming evil. He cannot in the end, of course,
be triumphant because this would mean a successful political
revolution against this invisible government. He must
fail, and become a martyr in his quest for truth.”
The audience gave him another standing ovation.
The “debate” ended at 11 pm.
Afterwards, we gathered backstage. Sonserai Lee, a Korean-American
friend of mine, arrived. We had a plan to dine at the
Royalton Hotel. Stone, who had not previously spoke
to me, suddenly shouted from across the room, “
Hey guys, where are you going to dinner?”
Sonserai said “The Royalton,” and, next
thing I knew, he joined us for dinner along with his
assistant Kristina Hare.
At dinner, Stone proved to be far more insightful that
I had expected from his movie. He also had demonstrated
the sort of sill and charm that a successful movie director
needs to keep actors performing. Towards the end of
dinner, he brought up the CIA’s former counterintelligence
chief, James Jesus Angleton. When I mentioned I knew
Angleton, he exclaimed, “Wow. Did he say if the
CIA killed JFK.”
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