Distant Voices (46 page)

I mentioned the incident at Battersea Town Hall when he defended the right of a neo-fascist to heckle him. ‘Does that right extend to everybody?' I asked him.

‘Yes. If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.'

‘But does a racist speaking in an ethnic community, using provocative, violent language, have that same right?'

‘Sure. Let's take an actual case. There is a largely Jewish town in Illinois with plenty of Holocaust survivors. A group of Nazis asked to have a march – very provocative. The American Civil Liberties Union defended their right and I agreed.'

I asked him if he would support the right of ‘free speech' for those calling for the death of Salman Rushdie.

‘To speak, yes . . . [but] you have to ask whether it's incitement to imminent violent action. There's no precise litmus test that tells you where to draw the line. [With Rushdie] I agree we're getting near the border. I mean if we got to the point where someone said, “Shoot!” and there's Rushdie standing over there, that's
not
protected [free speech]. If it's somebody making a speech saying I think he ought to be killed, I don't think they ought to be stopped from making that speech. Now how exactly you make these decisions is a subtle matter, but it seems to me protection of the right of freedom of speech is extremely important.'

Chomsky clearly pays a personal price for his dissidence. ‘It makes me infuriated,' he has said. ‘I get angry. I'm a pretty mild guy. I don't throw plates around, but internally I am seething all the time . . . A lot of my friends have burned out and I can understand that. It's very wearing and it's very frustrating.'

I asked him how he kept going. ‘I don't think you should underestimate the compensations. The United States is a very different country than it was thirty years ago. It's a much more civilised country, outside of educated circles . . . Today we have to revive the understanding of the eighteenth and
nineteenth century that autocratic control of the economic system is intolerable. There's a major attack on democracy going on in the world [with] a kind of world government being established which involves the IMF and the World Bank and the GATT. This has to be understood . . . and it has to be struggled against.'

June 1990 – December 1992

FIVE YEARS AFTER
the assassination of John Kennedy, I had dinner in New Orleans with Jim Garrison, then the city's district attorney. Garrison had gathered enough evidence to persuade three judges and a grand jury to indict a New Orleans businessman called Clay Shaw for conspiring with at least two others to murder the president.

Garrison's case contradicted the findings of the official Warren Commission, which in 1964 handed down twenty-six volumes of patently inconclusive reassurance that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accredited assassin, had acted alone. The Commission's report has since been largely discredited, not least by Congress, whose House Assassinations Committee in 1978 found, after a year-long investigation, that ‘President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.'

This is what Garrison concluded a decade earlier. He was a lone voice then, and a courageous one. Established forces, including Kennedy's successor Lyndon Johnson, had backed the Warren Commission; and Garrison himself was a prominent public official in a conservative southern city whose burghers did not mourn Kennedy. His life was threatened as a matter of routine; yet he was respected as an investigator; and he was incorruptible.

Garrison believed that Oswald was telling the truth when he announced to the world's press, shortly before his own assassination in the Dallas police headquarters, that he was a ‘patsy'. ‘Actually,' Garrison told me, ‘Oswald was a decoy who never knew the true nature of his job. He never expected
to die. There were about seven men involved in an old-fashioned ambush of the president. Shots came from the three directions and the assassination team didn't leave the scene until well after they had done the job. They were fanatical anti-Castro Cubans and other far-right elements with connections to the Central Intelligence Agency.'

Garrison's theory was that Kennedy had been working for a peaceful détente with Castro and the Soviet Union and had been already thinking ahead to an American withdrawal from Vietnam. Carl Oglesby, whose lobby group successfully urged the setting up of the Congressional Select Committee on Assassinations, recently wrote that Garrison, now a judge, believed that Kennedy was killed and Oswald framed ‘by a right-wing “parallel government” seemingly much like “the Enterprise” discovered in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and currently being rediscovered in the emerging BCCI scandal'.
¹³

Twenty-eight years after Kennedy was shot, Jim Garrison is back on the American stage: put there by the Hollywood director Oliver Stone, whose latest film,
JFK
, is based on Garrison's 1988 memoir,
On the Trail of the Assassins
.
¹⁴
Even before he had finished filming, Stone found himself under attack. The established press, which greeted the Warren Commission's report and barely acknowledged the congressional findings that undermined it, let fly at Stone on the basis of a leaked first-draft script, and less.

Stone's film, raged the
Chicago Tribune,
was an insult to ‘decency' itself. Indeed, there comes a point ‘at which intellectual myopia becomes morally repugnant. Mr Stone's new movie proves that he has passed that point.'
¹⁵
The writer had not seen even the script.

According to the
Los Angeles Times,
the ‘
JFK
knocking business has thus far consumed 1.2 million words'. It has filled 27 columns in the
New York Times
alone. It has produced a Big Brother cover on
Newsweek
warning the world ‘not to trust this movie'.
¹⁶
Stone has been accused of almost everything bar mother molestation: he has a war neurosis, he is homophobic, he has ‘fascist yearnings'.
¹⁷

The few who have defended the film have themselves been attacked. Pat Dowell, film critic of the
Washingtonian
magazine, wrote one laudatory paragraph and ended up having to resign after her editor killed it ‘on principle'. ‘My job', said the principled editor, ‘is to protect the magazine's reputation.' These are the words that threatened his magazine's reputation: ‘If you didn't already doubt the Warren Commission report, you will after seeing Oliver Stone's brilliantly crafted indictment of history as an official story. Is it the truth? Stone says you be the judge.'
¹⁸

In the
Washington Post
, the reporter who covered the Warren Commission, George Lardner, was given a page to mock Stone and Garrison. Referring to Garrison's suggestion that as many as five or six shots might have been fired at Kennedy, Lardner wrote, ‘Is this the Kennedy assassination or the Charge of the Light Brigade?'
¹⁹
The Congressional Assassinations Committee found that at least four shots and perhaps as many as six were fired. Two-thirds of the eye-witnesses reported a number of shots that came from in front of Kennedy and not from behind, where Oswald was hiding.

When I first went to Dallas in 1968, I interviewed five people who clearly remembered hearing shots that came from the bridge under which Kennedy's motorcade was about to pass. The trajectory of a bullet was still engraved in the pavement in Dealey Plaza; it could not have been fired by Oswald from behind.

One of the witnesses I spoke to was Roger Craig, a Dallas deputy sheriff on duty in Dealey Plaza as Kennedy's motorcade approached. He said that not only did the shots come from in front of Kennedy, but he saw Oswald getting into a waiting station wagon in Dealey Plaza fifteen minutes after the shooting. Craig later identified Oswald at Dallas police headquarters. He said Oswald remarked, ‘Everybody will know who I am now.' According to the Warren Commission, Oswald was nowhere near the police station when Craig saw him. After he repeated his evidence to Garrison, Craig was shot at in a Dallas parking lot. When I met him, he and his
family were being constantly followed and watched. He was subsequently ‘retired' from the Dallas police.

That was five years after the assassination, during which an estimated 35 to 47 people connected with it had died in unbelievable circumstances. Two Dallas reporters, who were at a meeting with nightclub owner Jack Ruby the night before he killed Oswald, died violently: one when a revolver ‘went off' in a police station, the other by a ‘karate chop' in the shower at his Dallas apartment. The columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, the only journalist to have a private interview with Jack Ruby during his trial, was found dead in her New York apartment after telling friends that she was going to Washington ‘to bust the whole thing open'. A CIA agent, who had also told friends he could no longer keep quiet about the assassination, was found shot in the back in his Washington apartment. David Ferrie, a pilot, was found dead in his New Orleans home with two suicide notes beside him. Four days earlier Ferrie had told reporters that Garrison had him ‘pegged as the get-away pilot in an elaborate plot to kill Kennedy'.

Midlothian is down the road from Dallas. When I met Penn Jones, the editor of the
Midlothian Mirror
, his offices had just been fire-bombed. Every week Penn Jones devoted space in his paper to evidence that the Warren Commission had ignored or dismissed out of hand. He showed me a pirated copy of the ‘Zapruder film', shot by Abraham Zapruder, a passerby in Dealey Plaza, and the only detailed record of Kennedy being shot. It shows Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly, who was seated in front of Kennedy, clearly being struck by separate bullets – once again, contradicting the Warren Commission. Time-Life bought the film for $25,000 but refused to release it for public viewing until Garrison subpoenaed it.

Garrison's efforts to build a case were frequently sabotaged. The extradition of witnesses from other states was refused; the FBI refused to co-operate. Garrison failed to convict Clay Shaw, because he could not prove Shaw's CIA connection. In 1975, a year after Shaw died, a senior
CIA officer, Victor Marchetti, claimed that both Shaw and Ferrie had worked for the CIA, and that the CIA had secretly backed Shaw against Garrison, who had been right all along.
²⁰

Perhaps this cannot now be proved; and Shaw, after all, was acquitted by a jury. But whether or not Garrison's version of events is ‘correct', none of the evidence he assembled deserves the orchestrated disclaimers that
JFK
has attracted.

Having now seen
JFK,
I understand the nature and gravity of Oliver Stone's crime. He has built a convincing version of the conspiracy to kill John Kennedy, and the conspiracy to cover it up. Worse, he is in danger of persuading the masses, especially the young who don't remember where they were on the assassination day. Worse still, he has told them through America's principal propaganda medium, Hollywood, and they are packing in to see his film. It is, wrote Andrew Kopkind in the
Nation,
an ‘historic achievement'.
²¹

You get a flavour of the achievement and the heresy from several of Stone's attackers, notably those who miss the irony of their own words. A
Washington Post
columnist, Charles Krauthammer, reminded his readers that ‘early in the days of
glasnost,
a formerly suppressed anti-Stalinist movie,
Repentance,
caused a sensation when shown in Moscow. It helped begin a revolution in political consciousness that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union. That is what happens in a serious political culture.'

What he is saying is that the custodians of American Stalinism can rest easy: that although ‘
JFK
's message is at least as disturbing as that of
Repentance
 . . . it is received by a citizenry so overwhelmed with cultural messages, and so anaesthetised to them, that a message as explosive as Stone's might raise an eyebrow, but never a fist.' Therefore: ‘The shallowness of our political culture has a saving grace.'
²²

Stone's film
is
an American version of
Repentance
; and you sense the fear of it from the Krauthammers as they deride unconvincingly the notion that the conspiracy ‘has remained airtight for 28 years'. It has not remained airtight; there is an abundance of available, documented evidence that
demolishes the official version, points to a co-ordinated operation in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and to a cover-up worthy of the crime.

For all the flaws in his film – and they are the usual Hollywood gratuities – Stone's unpardonable sin is that he has shamed a system that has not brought a single prosecution following the assassination (except Garrison's), and he has shamed journalism and journalists. ‘Where were
Newsweek,
the
New York Times . . . NBC et al.
for the last twenty-eight years?' wrote Kopkind in one of the few pieces to go against the tide. ‘Why didn't they scream from the commanding heights of the media that the government's most powerful agencies were covering up the US crime of the century? How can they blame Stone for doing what they should have done long ago?'
²³

Stone's film suggests that the assassination of Kennedy allowed Lyndon Johnson to escalate the Vietnam War. After winning the presidency in 1964 as a ‘peace' candidate, Johnson staged the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident', a wholly fraudulent tale about North Vietnam attacking American ships, and began to bomb North Vietnam in 1965. The marines were soon on their way.
²⁴
The suggestion that the United States did not ‘stumble' into Vietnam ‘naively' or ‘by mistake' is itself enough to enrage those who police the Authorised Truth.