WHO KILLED JFK?

WHO KILLED JFK?

            We can also add a bit to what we have below.  When Kennedy came into office, a big lie going around, that he believed, was that there was a “missile gap” and that we had to make many more of them to be safe.  Now who would profit from that?

        Kennedy hired Robert McNamara, not a very good guy in U.S. history, but who at least had the sense to apologize for continuing with Vietnam, to look into this gap.  Well, he found out that there was no such gap and that, in fact, the U.S. was way ahead in manufacturing missiles.  This did not make any friends for Kennedy.

        There is a great deal of other information below, but all of our interest in this started by looking back and wondering why each President was worse than the previous one since Kennedy.  Who stood to benefit?  The military, industrialist, corporate complex, that’s who.

        Anyway, here are some thoughts about the Assassination as the 50^th anniversary approaches.  I reprint some of my own writing here, followed by an in-depth interview from Democracy Now.

       

          For further information and documentation on the matter discussed below follow this link: http://statecrimesagainstdemocracy.blogspot.com/

 Illustration: 911dude.com Pentagon right after the strike.  Where is the airplane?

          There is actually nothing new about the secrets revealed in the article published in 2010, but it seems to be the first opportunity to reevaluate all that has been said about the so-called “Conspiracies”.  The central idea is that people use their minds to find the answer that best comports with their own pre-conceived biases or beliefs rather than to evaluate the evidence anew and attempt to arrive at a more scientific or objective solution.  Another word for this could be “lazy brain syndrome”. 

          This has been known for ages, actually, but simply has just recently become explicitly stated in a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by an extremely reliable and respected publication.  In the last cognitive revolution back in the 17^th Century many of the suppositions of the previous millennium and more were simply abandoned and replaced.  Descartes is best know for his statement Cogito Ergo Sum, which was the first thing he decided he could say after abandoning all his past beliefs and assumptions.  We can dispense with the usual criticisms inherent, such as he assumes that thinking is a process, that an “I” is capable of it, and that such was going on, and realize that some things we need to take on faith.  A similar fate befell Bertrand Russell in his attempt to “PROVE” that 2+2=4.  He failed.

          Still, it is common in people to dispense with this assumption altogether and simply believe what is easiest, a sort of Occam’s Razor of everyday life.  Thus, we find the extreme manifestation of this today in the religious fundamentalists’ belief that dinosaurs are only 6,000 years old despite all evidence to the contrary.  Certain interests in our government, especially during the past 90 years or so, have refined this tendency and taken advantage of it.  Much of this activity is found in the term “Conspiracy Theory,” a convenient way of dismissing and concealing activities of the government to further the interests of the intelligence industry.

          It is compounded by the fact that often these agents welcome such accusations against it in order to elude detection in other areas.  A classic example of this is Area 51, the place where Harry Truman allegedly concealed alien visitation from outer space, the UFOs, the “flying saucers,” issue.  In reality, a top-secret form of spy craft was apparently seen, denied by the government, and the media immediately seized on it as the UFO cover-up.  The intelligence community could not believe its luck and did its best to exploit the “conspiracy”.  Since military technology is often a decade or so ahead of public awareness, this media frenzy was secretly welcomed.  Denials of the UFOs of course fueled more speculation and, meanwhile, the military development was allowed to continue unscrutinized.  They could not have planned it better.

          We have a similar phenomenon today with the right-wing assertions that shiny black helicopters are roaming the skies as part of a United Nations takeover and world government run by the Trilateral Commission.  These are actually drones collecting information for NSA, but it will take some time for this to be made public.  Edward Snowden has already made enough of NSA’s practices known that there is no need for further analysis here.  Our government does not call them “conspiracy theorists” because they are simply wrong.  If they were right, then they would be so labeled.  For this reason, the term “State Crimes Against Democracy” (SCAD) has been coined to replace it.

          It was only after the JFK assassination that the term “Conspiracy Theorist” was coined and flying saucers used as an example.  It was a defensive move to label anyone who thought that the assassination of JFK was part of a governmental/intelligence agency and thus make the entire idea seem foolish and preposterous.  The Warren Commission Report was published as an attempt to explain the entire thing but, to the government’s chagrin, intelligent people began to actually read it, some of who became angry and others laughed, and the entire operation came into disrepute.  It was far easier to call anyone who questioned it a “Conspiracy Theorist” than to actually defend the report, far easier.

          So let us start over and see what we actually do know.  It is clear that the U.S. Government (other governments as well, but we will remain focused here) uses and sees no fault with assassination as an instrument in foreign policy, albeit as a last resort.  One clear example is Mossadegh, the socialist leader of Iran, in 1953.  We replaced him with the Shah, a brutal dictator with obvious long-term results.  He was eventually overthrown and replaced with an extremist Islamic government.  The government actually worked in the interests of the people for awhile until some of its more secular and logical leaders fled the country or were executed and the focus turned to making sure that men and women did not swim at the same time and so on.  The one aspect of the country and its government that remains even today is that it will not obey us and is determined not to be undermined by us.  This is the legacy of Dulles. 

          Other examples include Salvador Alliende in 1973, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia after the Oil Embargo, Omar Torrios in Panama, Patrice Lumumba in Africa, activists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen (and their children), and well-known are the many failed attempts on Fidel Castro.  The deaths by cancer in Central and South America also seem suspicious, including Venezuela and Brazil.

          Now, where and when have we seen likely SCADs?  As mentioned, the assassination of JFK is the one that comes to mind most easily.  Now, how could this be foreign policy related?  At the time he was assassinated, 20,000 American Soldiers, all volunteers, were stationed in Viet Nam.  In addition, the U.S. sprayed deathly chemical over the entire country in 1962.  In Cuba, we had the Bay of Pigs incident, among others.  Kennedy also had a need to prove his manhood against Castro.  Kennedy grew up during Korea in a wealthy family with an urge to become a politician.  Castro grew up poor in Cuba with pitching baseball for the New York Yankees as his goal.  Pitching can take a great deal more cognitive analysis and inventiveness than American politics. 

          A bit more historical fact is needed here.  Castro took over Cuba from out puppet, Batista, well-portrayed in the Godfather movie movies.  When he took over, he nationalized all the companies (today it would be “corporations”).  He did offer to reimburse the companies for their value, but they refused, saying they were worth much more than he offered.  He then agreed to pay whatever their valuation was, provided they pay back taxes based on that valuation.  They refused saying that taxation is wrong, or a betrayal, or some other evil thing.  He then simply kept them without reimbursement.   He seemed to have no choice.  This was during the Eisenhower/Nixon administration and, again, Dulles was involved.  Viet-Nam began at least under the Eisenhower/Nixon administration, but Truman may have had a role in taking over the colonial role from France.  Certainly Truman’s behavior towards Stalin at Yalta contributed to the years of the so-called “cold-war.”  At any rate, all of this was inherited by Kennedy.

          Now, the Bay of Pigs fiasco was a CIA operation planned during Eisenhower/Nixon and when Kennedy finally realized how the CIA was running things counter to his own objectives, he, in his brother’s terms, “cleaned house” and the entire Dulles era was over.  His brother’s leashing of J. Edgar Hoover did not endear him to the FBI, whose role is supposed to be entirely internal, but by that time it is possible that organized crime found out about Hoover’s sexual fetishes.  At any rate, Hoover concentrated increasingly on “Communists” with the country rather than crime figures.  Of course, this meant a concentration on those who sympathized with Castro as well as, eventually, those who opposed Vietnam policies.

           It is somewhat obscure, even today, whether Kennedy intended to withdraw from Vietnam in his second term.  It is also obscure whether the Cuban missile crisis taught him anything, as it was only the decision of one Soviet captain not to launch nuclear missiles, against orders, that kept hostilities from breaking out.  What is clear is what happened after his assassination and the election of LBJ.  In short, who had the most to gain from his assassination?

         

          After his assassination, LBJ had himself sworn in immediately, drafter Earl Warren from the Supreme Court to make things seem quite non-conspiratorial.  The fact that the only accused only had a chance to say “I’m only a patsy” before he was killed, his killer died after his request to be transferred out of state was refused, 22 key witnesses died within two years, and so on has been well-documented.  Mark Lane and others have done extensive work on this and all agree that there WAS a conspiracy.  Beyond that, there is disagreement as to who was behind it.

          Well, right after the next election, LBJ had over 500,000 troops in Vietnam.  Nothing changed in respect to Castro.  For each soldier in Vietnam, 20 support staff were required.  The military budget skyrocketed.  Any party who supplied munitions and other wares to the military profited immensely as did the intelligence community.  This war continued until Gerald Ford was in office.  LBJ was great at arm twisting as he managed to force Israel’s support for Vietnam in return for arms during the 67 war, as atonement for attacking the U.S.S. Enterprise, and also induced Arthur Goldberg, an excellent Supreme Court Justice, to quit the lifetime appointment in order to support Israel at the United Nations.  The only thing of value Goldberg did after that idiotic move was to liberate baseball for the reserve clause with Curt Flood as his client.

          MLK was shadowed for years by Hoover as a “Communist Agent,” but anything King did was sanctioned until he made one mistake.  He made a speech against the war – he was assassinated within hours or days.

          RFK was careful not to publicly oppose the War, but it was well known that such was his intention.  When it became clear that he would be able to have a credible chance of being nominated for the Presidency and would have defeated Nixon (it was well known that he was also his brother’s campaign manager), he had to go.

          All of Malcolm X’s activities were allowed until he went to Mecca and returned, attracted a large following, and started talking about international matters.  He had to go.  In fact, any African American leader with a large following who dares speak ill of U.S. foreign policy had to go.  Is it now clear why Obama seems so pro-military?

          Under Nixon and Regan, military spending increased exponentially. 

          So, what other conspiracies are in contention?  The latest one is the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center.  Clearly, Bush wanted to invade Iraq and kill Sadam, and much was done in the name of protecting us from a repeat of 9/11.  Clearly, Bib Laden was first recruited and trained by the U.S. and had offices in New York City as he prepared to lead opposition to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.  In addition, quite a bit of chemicals, the type only used in intentional implosions of building were found at the site.  Clearly, there is no reason to doubt that it was welcome by the Bush administration, Haliburton, and Blackwater.  There is much room for skepticism and certainly there is no reason to rule it out as a conspiracy on the grounds that George W. Bush was too moral to sanction such an undertaking.

          Additional questions arise as well: why is there no publicity or controversy over the crash into the Pentagon?  Surely, that should be a matter of interest.  We hear little about the destruction of building number seven which was not hit.  We do know that there had been considerable communication between government officials (nameless) and Al-Qaeda officials (nameless).  What did they talk about?   We do know very well that no individual had more personal animosity for Saddam Hussein that did Bin Laden. 

          The biggest and most plausible objection to all of these assassinations is that it would be impossible for a large governmental agency to keep all participants quiet.  However, it is also quite clear that they were well orchestrated.  Everyone involved only knew so much, and most did not even know that their actions were involved in these assassinations.  Those who knew too much and could not be trusted to remain silent are dead.

          The problem today in uncovering any of these State Crimes Against Democracy is that it is much easier for everyone simply to dismiss the accusations as “nutty conspiracy theories like area 51,” and go on their ways.  American people are mentally lazy anyhow, and the term “conspiracy theory” makes it easy for them not to be bothered with making the effort.  Additionally, our school system indoctrinates remorselessly towards patriotism and thus predisposes them to reinforce their notions rather than challenge them. 

         

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2013

Oliver Stone on 50th Anniversary of JFK Assassination & the Untold History of the United States

Three-time Academy Award-winning director, producer and screenwriter Oliver Stone joins us for the hour to discuss the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, which was chronicled in his blockbuster film, "JFK." A Vietnam War veteran, Stone has made around two dozen acclaimed Hollywood films, including "Platoon," "Salvador," "Born on the Fourth of July," "Nixon," "South of the Border" and "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps." A commemorative edition of "JFK" comes out next week. Most recently, Stone has co-written the 10-part Showtime series, "Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States," and companion book with the same name, co-written by Peter Kuznick, professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This month marks the 50th anniversary of an assassination that continues to haunt the nation. On November 22nd, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was hardly past his first thousand days in office when he was fatally shot as his motorcade passed through Dallas, Texas. His death is marked by still unanswered questions. We’ll look back at Kennedy’s life and legacy with our guest for the hour, acclaimed film director Oliver Stone. His 1991 political thriller, JFK, examined the events leading to Kennedy’s assassination and the alleged subsequent cover-up through the eyes of former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner. This is the trailer of the film JFK.

NARRATOR: A shocking assassination of a president.

JIM GARRISON: [played by Kevin Costner] John F. Kennedy’s murder was probably one of the most terrible moments in the history of our country.

NARRATOR: The outrageous murder of a suspect.

JACK RUBY: [played by Brian Doyle-Murray] Oswald!

REPORTER: Oswald’s been shot!

NARRATOR: The total obsession of a district attorney.

JIM GARRISON: Who killed the president?

DAVID FERRIE: [played by Joe Pesci] Oh, man!

JACK MARTIN: [played by Jack Lemmon] Do I have to spell it out for you, Mr. Garrison?

NARRATOR: Who will risk everything.

LIZ GARRISON: [played by Sissy Spacek] I think you care more about John Kennedy than your own family.

NARRATOR: To find the truth.

X: [played by Donald Sutherland] Why was Kennedy killed?

DAVID FERRIE: There’s a death warrant out for me, you know?

X: Who benefited?

DEAN ANDREWS: [played by John Candy] The government’s going to jump all over your head, Jimbo.

X: Who has the power to cover it up?

NARRATOR: Who killed JFK?

JIM GARRISON: Now we’re through the looking glass here, people.

WILLIE O’KEEFE: [played by Kevin Bacon] People got to know.

JIM GARRISON: Y’all got to start thinking on a different level, like the CIA does.

WILLIE O’KEEFE: People got to know why he was killed.

JIM GARRISON: The truth is the most important value we have.

LIZ GARRISON: I just want to raise our children and live a normal life. I want my life back!

NARRATOR: Kevin Costner.

JIM GARRISON: Nothing is going to keep me from going ahead with my investigation of John Kennedy’s murder.

NARRATOR: In an Oliver Stone film.

JIM GARRISON: I say let justice be done or the heavens fall.

NARRATOR: JFK.

AMY GOODMAN: Part of the trailer to Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK. When Kennedy was killed, the official narrative was immediately questioned. Nearly five decades later, a new poll has found a clear majority of Americans still suspect there was a conspiracy behind the assassination. However, according to the Associated Press JFK poll, the percentage of those who believe accused shooter Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is at its highest level since the mid-’60s. The survey, conducted in mid-April, said 59 percent of Americans think multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president, while 24 percent think Oswald acted alone, 16 percent are still unsure. A 2003 Gallup poll found 75 percent of Americans felt there was a conspiracy.

We’re joined for the hour by three-time Academy Award-winning director, producer, screenwriter, Oliver Stone. A Vietnam War veteran, he’s made around two dozen acclaimed Hollywood films, including Platoon, Wall Street, Salvador, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon, W., South of the Border and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. A commemorative edition of JFK comes out on Blu-ray next week as the 50th anniversary of his assassination approaches on November 22nd. Most recently, Stone has co-written a multi-part Showtime series called Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, which is also available on Blu-ray and includes a companion book with the same name.

We’re also joined by Peter Kuznick, a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, co-author of The Untold History of the United States.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Oliver Stone, let’s begin with you. As we move into this 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, your thoughts?

OLIVER STONE: Thank you, Amy, for having me back. It’s nice to see you again. Hello, Peter.

PETER KUZNICK: Hi, Oliver.

OLIVER STONE: My thoughts. I saw the film inside these last few days, and I’ve been able to assess it again, and I’ve followed the cases more or less from the outside. I haven’t been inside. It’s amazing to me that people still deny it. As you know, I was in the infantry in Vietnam. I had a fair amount of combat experience. I saw people blown away in action. When you look once again at the basics of the film—the bullets, the autopsy, the forensics, the shooting path—and stay away from all the other stuff—Oswald’s background and Garrison, etc.—just follow the meat, the evidence, what you see with your own eyes in those six seconds, it’s an amazing—it’s all there. It doesn’t need to be elaborated upon. You can see it with your own eyes.

You see Kennedy make his—get a hit in the throat. Then you see Kennedy get a hit in the back. Then you see him essentially get a hit from the front. When he gets the hit from the front, which is the fourth or the fifth or the sixth shot, he goes back and to the left. That’s the basic evidence. You see a man fly back because he gets hit right here. Many witnesses at Parkland and at the autopsy in Bethesda saw a massive exit wound to the rear of his skull, to the right side. The people at Parkland, including the young doctor, McClelland, saw his cerebellum, his brain, go out the—almost falling out of the back of his skull. Later, when he gets taken—illegally—to the—to Bethesda, Maryland, the military—

AMY GOODMAN: Why illegal?

OLIVER STONE: Via what?

AMY GOODMAN: You said when he was taken illegally.

OLIVER STONE: He was taken immediately, I mean, within an hour or two, he start—but it takes four hours to fly there, plus the autopsy doesn’t go off until later that evening. And it’s manipulated. It’s—the doctors at the autopsy are not in charge of the autopsy. They’re naval—naval technicians, surgeons. The military is telling them what to do.

And when this whole thing emerges, what we have are weird shots of—the back of his head is patched up, basically. And the shot—they’re trying to justify the shot from the rear to the front. So they’re saying that the shot from the back came into his back and hit Connally. There’s—they talk about three bullets. One missed. The magic bullet, that was devised by Arlen Specter and others, devises a path that’s impossible. It’s seven wounds in two people, in Kennedy and in Connally. The bullet hits Kennedy—

AMY GOODMAN: This was John Connally.

OLIVER STONE: —in the back, goes out his throat, zigs to the right, hits Connally in the left, goes down to Connally’s right wrist. It bounces back into his left knee. It’s a farce. And they got away with it, because it’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo, and they used scientific evidence. But when people are in combat, they see things. They see people—they go with the bullet wound. It’s essential. And this was a—Kennedy was shot right before Connally in the back. Connally gets shot. Then Kennedy—

AMY GOODMAN: Governor Connally.

OLIVER STONE: —gets the head shot. So there’s at least five shots here. And this is what you have to go in—look at the Zapruder film over and over again, even if they altered it, which—

AMY GOODMAN: And for young people who don’t know who Zapruder was, and the film—

OLIVER STONE: Oh, Zapruder was a—was a local man who shot this film, that was taken by the CIA and the Secret Service, and it was altered a bit, I think. There’s a lot of evidence to that effect. You have to—you’re getting into scientific now. But the Zapruder film, even now, is the best signpost. It’s the timing of the—it’s the timing. It shows you the, how do you call, the time frame of the assassination.

And we have a scene in the movie where you see the man trying to do what Oswald did with a bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from World War II, which is a very bad weapon, Italian weapon, infantryman rifle. And you have to fire the shot, through a tree, at a moving—at a target moving away from you. You can’t do it. Two teams ofFBI experts tried to do it, plus CBS, I believe, and various other organizations have tried to simulate that shooting in less than six seconds. It’s not possible. So, this was a sophisticated ambush. There had to be a shot from the front, from that—from that front, that fence, and at least one shooter from the front. At least one.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to a clip from your film, JFK, when former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison watches a TV news report about Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged killer. Then he makes a phone call to his associate and tells him to investigate Oswald’s connection to New Orleans a little bit further.

REPORTER: ... of Lee Harvey Oswald.

MATTIE: [played by Pat Perkins] A fine man.

REPORTER: After a stint in the Marines, he apparently became fascinated by communism.

BOB: He is still believed to be a dedicated Marxist and a fanatical supporter of Fidel Castro and ultra-left-wing causes. He spent last summer in New Orleans and was arrested there in a brawl with anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

REPORTER: And apparently, Bob, Oswald had been passing out pro-Castro pamphlets for an organization ...

JIM GARRISON: Hello, Lou? Yeah, sorry to disturb you this late.

LOU IVON: [played by Jay O. Sanders] That’s all right. I’m watching it, too.

JIM GARRISON: Yeah, a matter of routine, but we better get on this Oswald connection to New Orleans right away.

LOU IVON: Mm-hmm.

JIM GARRISON: All right, I want you to check out his record, find any friends or associates from last summer. Let’s meet with the senior assistants and investigators day after tomorrow, all right?

LOU IVON: That be on Sunday?

JIM GARRISON: Sunday, yeah, at 11:00.

LOU IVON: All right.

JIM GARRISON: All right, thanks, Lou.

LOU IVON: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Kevin Costner, who played Jim Garrison, who is actually the central figure in your film. Why Jim Garrison, the DA?

OLIVER STONE: Well, Jim Garrison was the only public official who brought charges in the case. He started this case. It was a very difficult thing to bring charges against the covert operations of a U.S. government, which he thought it was. You know, now that we’ve lived a little longer and we’re older, we know about how difficult that is. We know Snowden’s case. We know WikiLeaks’s case. We know Manning’s case. All these people have been—can’t get it out. I mean, they had trouble. People disbelieve it. When Garrison believed the story, as I did—I was younger—years go by, three years later Garrison—Garrison calls in David Ferrie. He—very suspicious things happened in New Orleans. But he was suspicious , but the FBI dismissed all—dismissed all the witnesses he called. Three years later, he got into the case because Senator Russell Long of Georgia told him that he didn’t believe this—this Warren—

AMY GOODMAN: Of Louisiana.

OLIVER STONE: So, Garrison started to read the whole Warren Commission, and he started to see all the inconsistencies of it, and he started to call in the witnesses. He got into some hot water. The CIA watched this thing very closely. We now know that they had files on Jim. They bugged his offices. They stole the files. They had informants on his staff. It was an impossible case. Three of his witnesses died. Others—others just were not called. They were—the subpoenas were denied, etc. He called Allen Dulles. He called several members of the CIA. That was not allowed.

AMY GOODMAN: Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, Allen Dulles had been the head of the CIA, had been fired by Kennedy and was the head of the Warren Commission and ran the commission, which is a very bizarre—

AMY GOODMAN: And the Warren Commission is the one that had investigated—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —done the so-called independent investigation.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, you’re asking me to go through the whole case here. Yeah, the Warren Commission is the—is the Rosetta Stone of this country. It’s another one of these mists that covers up.

You know, look, this case is very similar, that scene you showed—when Snowden was first described as a lone, fame-seeking narcissist, you find very much the similarities to the Oswald case. Oswald was identified right away, on that Friday afternoon. They had the profile ready. This is a lone nut, Marxist sympathizer, who obviously was not only alienated, but disliked Kennedy—none of which is true, because he was none of these things. And we go—you can find that out by reading or looking at the movie. But the first label seems to stick, whether it was the WMD in Iraq, when you put that first story out there. And there’s something about that, whether it’s the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that kicks off the Vietnam War or the—for that matter, the blowing up of the Maine in the Spanish harbor. These stories spread, and that first impression stays. And that’s—it’s a shame. It’s like the Reichstag fire in Germany.

And Oswald has been—what bothers me the most is that people who are intelligent,The New York Times, the Vanity Fair fellow, the guy in The New Yorker, they write these long pieces, and they just—and they say, essentially, in the article, "Well, we—history has sort of shown us that Oswald is the—the consensus is that Oswald did it alone." Well, but they don’t read the books by Bob Groden or Cyril Wecht or James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable, or they don’t deal with the ballistics, which is very important because the argument—Bob Groden has done the best photographic analysis of the bullet wounds and the photography. And he can show, in his last book—his most recent book is called Absolute Proof. It’s coming out right now. Bob Groden has done—has been on this thing 30 years. He’s the best. Talk to the people who really have studied pathology, autopsies and photo evidence.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Oliver Stone, why does this matter 50 years later?

OLIVER STONE: Ah, good question. Good question. What was Kennedy doing? Peter and I address this in a larger text in our Untold History of the United States. A very important president. Keep in mind, this is 13 years after the national security state starts. We are massively armed. Between 1947, Truman, and Eisenhower in 1960, we go from 1,000 nuclear weapons to 30,000 nuclear weapons. By 1960, we are supreme. We are the sole superpower, truly. We have the ability at this point, after many crises with the Soviet Union, many nuclear threats made by Eisenhower—several, five, six—John Foster Dulles believed in brinksmanship—you remember that policy?—taking things to the brink. We called it a containment of communism, but really we were forcing back, rolling back. We were aggressive. We wanted a war, basically, because we knew that the Soviets would arm up after 1960, they would catch up with us eventually. We feared that. They never did, but we feared it. We knew in 1960 that in a first-strike situation we could win, and we could—we could sustain the retaliation. So we had a very hopped-up Pentagon.

We saw in Berlin there was an anger at Kennedy for what they called being soft on communism, which meant that he allowed the wall to be built. Remember when the Berlin Wall went up, Kennedy had a great quote. He said, "I’d rather have a wall than a war." And he was looked—he was looked on as a young man, not up to Eisenhower’s military status, not up to snuff. When Cuba came around, he failed to support the Bay of Pigs invasion. And then he failed to go into Laos, which was expected of him. And then, when the October crisis rolled around in ’62, he backed down. That was their viewpoint of it. He backed down, and he said no to invading Cuba, to going in and bombing the missile sites.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting, Oliver, when we put out yesterday that you were coming on, we were just inundated with questions and—

OLIVER STONE: It’s a very important issue.

AMY GOODMAN: On our Facebook page, Ronan Duggan posted this question to you: "Would you agree that much of the history of JFK has been romanticized and he has been transformed into a sort of liberal hero? The truth is he was a horrific warmonger," said this person on Facebook.

OLIVER STONE: No, no. Kennedy, on the contrary, he did—had to—you could not become president in 1960, I mean, by being soft on communism. You had to be a hardliner. It was the only way to get elected. Yeah, he went to the right of Nixon at that point, true, and—but he did not know the missile gap. He believed the missile gap existed, that was being talked about. When he got into office, within six weeks, he hired Bob McNamara, an outsider from Ford, to be his defense secretary. He had McNamara go into the Pentagon and find out where we were. And he found out that it was all a myth, that in fact we were way ahead of the Soviets, on every level—on every level—and that we could have, unfortunately, a first strike against the Soviet Union. He realized, in that atmosphere, that his generals were up to—were really gearing up for a war, because if they didn’t fight the Soviets in 1960, their thinking was that the Soviets are going to catch up, and we’re going to have these crises in Berlin, Vietnam, Laos for the rest—it will—there will be a war sometime in the near future, by 1970. So they’re thinking about let’s do it, let’s do it now. And you remember the Dr. Strangelove movie about the whole thing about the retaliation? You remember Jack Ripper, the Sterling Hayden character? That’s based on Curtis LeMay, who was the chief of staff of the Air Force, and Thomas Power also, who was later the chief of staff. He was an Air Force general. These people wanted war. Or Arleigh Burke of the Navy, Lemnitzer, who was the chief of the—the head of the whole thing, chief of staff at the beginning. This new book, Bob Dallek, who’s an establishment historian, doesn’t agree with our assassination concept, he goes into detail in Camelot’s Court, this new book, about how Kennedy was fighting, for those years, with the military on all fronts.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going break and then come back. Our guest is Oliver Stone, three-time Academy Award-winning director, producer, screenwriter. Among his films, JFK. This month is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. When we come back, we’ll also be joined by Peter Kuznick, history professor at American University. Together, they did Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Our guests for the hour, Oliver Stone, many-time Academy Award-winning director, producer, screenwriter; Peter Kuznick, history professor at American University. They co-authored the many-part series, The Untold History of the United States. It’s in both book form as well as DVD. It’s a Showtime series. I want to go right now to this clip from Untold History of the United States, which recalls a close call that happened October 27, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, when it was ultimately a Soviet colonel who averted nuclear war.

OLIVER STONE: On October 27th, an incident occurred that Schlesinger described as not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, it was "the most dangerous moment in human history." The Russian ships were heading toward the quarantine line. One of four Soviet submarines sent to protect the ships was being hunted all day by the carrier, USS Randolph. More than a hundred miles outside the blockade, the Randolph began dropping depth charges, unaware the sub was carrying nuclear weapons. The explosion rocked the submarine, which went dark except for emergency lights. The temperature rose sharply. The carbon dioxide in the air reached near-lethal levels, and people could barely breathe. Men began to faint and fall down. The suffering went on for four hours. Then, the Americans hit us with something stronger. We thought, "That’s it. The end." Panic ensued.

Commander Valentin Savitsky tried, without success, to reach the general staff. He assumed the war had already started, and they were going to die in disgrace for having done nothing. He ordered the nuclear torpedo to be prepared for firing. He turned to the other two officers aboard. Fortunately for mankind, the political officer, Vasili Arkhipov, was able to calm him down and convince him not to launch—probably single-handedly preventing nuclear war.

AMY GOODMAN: Oliver Stone narrating The Untold History of the United States, which was co-written by Oliver Stone and our guest, Peter Kuznick, as well, history professor at American University. Just continue on this 1962 moment and how—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —nuclear war was averted, Oliver.

OLIVER STONE: Well, it was during this crisis in October, it—Eisenhower told Kennedy, through an intermediary, to go, to bomb. But we had no concept of what the Russians—there was 40,000 Russian troops, hardened troops, under the command of the commander of the—of Stalingrad during World War II. There were a rough, tough unit. They would have gone the distance. They had a hundred nuclear—battlefield nuclear weapons. A hundred. We didn’t know that. McNamara admitted all this much later in his life. The Cubans were armed, like 200,000 Cubans, so that we would have faced far more significant casualties going in there than we thought. It would have evolved into a real nuclear confrontation in the Caribbean, and it probably would have spread, most likely spread quickly, because we had bombers armed to go over China, drop bombs on China, from Okinawa. We were ready to blow off the Soviet Union. That was Eisenhower’s plan, was essentially—because what Eisenhower did in his eight years of office was to make nuclear weapons a alternative to conventional weapons, because we didn’t have the size of the conventional weapons of the Soviets, so we were ready to use nuclear. We were ready to go, and Washington was in the sights. The whole world, I don’t—I think, would have gone up.

Khrushchev and Kennedy, at the last second, through their—through Dobrynin and his brother Robert, said no, basically, to their hardliners. And it cost both men dearly. The generals were furious with Kennedy. LeMay was raging at the meeting that was described by McNamara and others. They thought—LeMay said, "We lost. We lost. This was our moment." And Khrushchev was criticized by his own people, but the Soviets were inferior in strength. And they—but they built up after that crisis. They built up significantly, so by the late 1970s they were almost achieving parity. So, in other words, Kennedy and Khrushchev saved—what we’re saying is Kennedy and Khrushchev saved the world at a very key moment. We owe him a lot.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kuznick, this is also the beginning of the Cuban embargo that exists to this day, 1962. Can you explain how that happened?

PETER KUZNICK: Well, the United States policy was really to overthrow the Castro government, to do everything it could to sabotage, undermine, overthrow the Castro government. The fear was that you were going to have similar kinds of revolutionary movements throughout Latin America, that they would stand as an example. The United States policy since that time has been not only to isolate the Cuban government, but to attempt to prevent similar kind of left-wing uprisings from occurring elsewhere.

We do overthrow other governments down there. For example, the way we treat Vietnam in our Vietnam episode, episode seven, is we put it in a different context. We want to show that Vietnam is not an aberration, so we begin with the overthrow of the government in Brazil in 1964. We then go to the overthrow in the Dominican Republic in 1965. We show the U.S. role in the bloodbath in Indonesia in 1965. We talk about the escalation of Vietnam. And we also talk about U.S. overthrow of the Allende government in Chile.

The big concern for the United States was not Cuba itself; it was the possibility throughout Latin America, in our own backyard, for a series of communist revolutions and for radical movements down there. We work, under Kissinger, with the right-wing governments in Latin America in something called Operation Condor, which was basically an operation to set up death squads throughout Latin America to kill not only revolutionaries, but reformers and dissidents. We see this policy continue through the 1980s under the Reagan administration throughout Central America, the U.S. working with the right-wing government in El Salvador, the U.S. role in Guatemala, the U.S. support for the Contras in Nicaragua. So Cuba is only a small piece in it.

But as Oliver is saying, the Cuban missile crisis is a crucial turning point, and it’s a crucial turning point in Kennedy’s mind and in Khrushchev’s mind. Khrushchev, afterwards, writes a letter to Kennedy in which he says, "Evil has done some good. Our people have felt the flames of thermonuclear war. Let’s take an advantage of this." He said, "Let’s remove every possible area of conflict between us that can lead to another crisis. Let’s stop all nuclear testing. Let’s remove all the problems between us." So, Khrushchev then says, "Let’s get rid of the military blocks. Let’s get rid ofNATO. Let’s get rid of the Warsaw Pact." He reaches out to Kennedy. This is actually a moment, as he says that, evil can bring some good, because what Kennedy and Khrushchev both understood from the Cuban missile crisis was that despite all of their efforts to prevent a nuclear war, when a crisis like this occurs, they actually lose control. They both—we came very close to nuclear war despite the fact that both of them were doing everything they could to avert it at that point. So Khrushchev says, "Let’s get rid of anything that could cause another conflict."

And what happens over the next year, until Kennedy’s assassination, is they do begin to cooperate on a number of issues. As Oliver was saying before, Kennedy had a lot of enemies. And the reason why he had so many enemies is because he stood up to the generals, to the joint chiefs, to the intelligence community, to the establishment, time after time after time. And then, in this period, we reach out. We conclude the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty. The joint chiefs were furious about the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty. It was the first nuclear arms control treaty we had. He begins to reach out to Cuba for rapprochement with Cuba at the end of his life. Castro was very, very disappointed when Kennedy was assassinated. He talks about pulling the U.S. forces out of Vietnam. In NSAM 263, he wants to pull a thousand troops out by the end of the year, get all the troops out by 1965. His signature initiative, in many people’s mind, is the space race. Kennedy says, "Why should we be competing with the Soviet Union for who’s going to be first to get into space? We should work together jointly for a joint mission of space exploration and putting a man jointly on the moon." And in his American University commencement address, he basically calls for an end to the Cold War.

So, the Kennedy of 1963, in response to that person who posted on Facebook, Kennedy of 1963 was really very much of a visionary. And Oliver and I believe that this was the last time we had an American president who was really willing to—wanted to change the direction of the country, stand up to the militarists, stand up to the intelligence community, and take the United States in a very different direction. So, the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination is not just that we lost this one man, but it’s that the United States and the Soviet Union were both looking to take the world in a very, very different direction. And Kennedy is assassinated. Khrushchev is ousted the next year. And as we say—Kennedy, in his inauguration, says we’re going to pass the torch forward to a new generation, and we say that now the torch has been passed back to the old generation, the generation of Johnson, Nixon, Eisenhower, and the world goes back very heavily into Cold War.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back—

PETER KUZNICK: Johnson wastes little time.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a clip from The Untold History of the United States, where you look at the transition from JFK to LBJ.

OLIVER STONE: With the ascension of Vice President Lyndon Johnson, there would be important changes in many of Kennedy’s policies, particularly towards the Soviet Union and Vietnam.

PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: I will do my best. That is all I can do.

OLIVER STONE: In his inaugural address in the morning of that decade in January 1961—

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY: Let the word go forth, from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.

OLIVER STONE: But with his murder, the torch was passed back to an old generation, the generation of Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Reagan, leaders who would systematically destroy the promise of Kennedy’s last year, as they returned the country to war and repression. Though the vision Khrushchev and Kennedy had expressed would fall with them, it would not die. The seeds they had planted would germinate and sprout again long after their deaths.

AMY GOODMAN: Oliver Stone narrating The Untold History of the United States.

OLIVER STONE: Yes, yeah. It’s five years of my life. It’s perhaps my most ambitious project.

AMY GOODMAN: Why is this so important to you? It begins actually in what, 1898? The year after my grandmother was born.

OLIVER STONE: It begins with—it begins with the Spanish-American War and the first, really, effort overseas by America to expand. We take the Philippines, and we basically take Cuba. This whole series, from 1898 to 2013 is—in a sense, it’s a mourning. It’s a mourning for a country that could, after World War II, have taken another direction. And if Roosevelt had lived a little longer, it may well have, or if Henry Wallace had been the—had been the real vice president. And when I think—what we’re doing, Peter and I, is we’re really—after George Bush had been in office two terms in 2008, we said, "What is—is he an aberration, or is he a continuation of a pattern?" So we went back to our early lives in the 1940s and studied this whole pattern. And we see a pattern. If you look at all chapters together quickly, in 12 hours, you feel the dream, the fever dream, the aggression, the militarism, the racism towards the Third World—it doesn’t end—the exploitation.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact—

OLIVER STONE: There’s good things, too. I’m not saying only bad things. We try to point out the hopes.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, didn’t this project start around you wanting to tell the story of Henry Wallace? Most people who are watching right now don’t even know who Henry Wallace was.

OLIVER STONE: Henry Wallace is a wonderful character, but not the only character in this thing. No, the—what for me was the important thing—I was born right after it—was the atomic bomb. I always had accepted, like I accepted the story of Kennedy’s assassination, I accepted that we needed to drop the bomb to win World War II, because the Japanese were fanatics. Well, we’ve got to go back to that myth, and we explore it in depth. And we have it—I think we show that our use of the bomb was criminal and immoral. And we proved to the Soviet Union, as well as to the world, that we could be as barbaric as the Nazis were.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain why you think the world would be a very different place if this vice president in the 1940s—

OLIVER STONE: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: —Henry Wallace, had actually continued to be the vice president under FDR?

OLIVER STONE: Yeah. Well, because he was a—he was a peace seeker. He was a man of international vision. He spoke of the century of the common man in—it was a counter to Henry Luce of Time magazine that made a speech about this is the American century. Luce talks a lot like Hillary Clinton these days. So, Wallace countered with, "No, America should stand for the common man throughout the world." He was very much an internationalist—women’s rights, labor rights, believed in—hated colonialism, hated the British Empire and all of what Winston Churchill was fighting for in World War II. They were enemies. Roosevelt agreed with a lot of them, but Roosevelt was sickening and weakening, and the country was becoming more fearful of postwar issues. Wallace hung in there, although he had been robbed of the vice presidency by a fixed convention in ’44. He hung in there as secretary of commerce under Truman for as long as he could, fighting for peace after the war. Of course, he was called a communist and all that stuff, but he was really a liberal. And—

AMY GOODMAN: He ran for president in 1948.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, as a third party.

AMY GOODMAN: But in ’44, he was knocked out, and Truman was the vice-presidential candidate of FDR.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, and Wallace was the most popular man in the—at the Democratic convention. He had 65 percent of the Democratic voters liked him. And he almost won that first night, but he was blocked. The convention was closed down. Fire exits were closed, or something like that. Truman had 2 percent of the vote. Truman was a nonentity who overnight became—and didn’t know much about what Roosevelt’s plans were. But the—the Grand Alliance—

AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of the ascension of Truman after FDR died in office?

OLIVER STONE: Yes. And he—

AMY GOODMAN: He is the one who dropped the bomb.

OLIVER STONE: Truman, within two weeks of becoming president after Roosevelt’s death, insulted the Soviet foreign minister. I mean, it was—within 11 days, our policy towards the Soviet Union shifted and stayed that way. And, you know, if you read all the revisionist historians who have written about this in depth, the United States took a hostile—Roosevelt had a vision, and it was a Grand Alliance between the Soviets and the British. Perhaps that was very hard to maintain. It takes a big man. Roosevelt was that kind of thinker. Wallace was. And we’re saying Kennedy was. And I urge you to rethink your—the fellow who said he was a warmonger, please, rethink Kennedy and look at everything here we’re talking about. This is a big issue. But we’ve lost that Grand Alliance. We’ve lost that—we’ve lost that leadership that’s bigger than simply ideological economic factions, is what we have in the United States. We’ve given in to what Peter called militarism, as you know very well.

AMY GOODMAN: When we come back from break, I want to ask you about this next chapter of American history, about surveillance and drones, about President Obama and where you think he stands, and also about this next project that you’ll be working on around Dr. King.

OLIVER STONE: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! We’re with Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour, three-time Academy Award-winning director, producer, screenwriter, Oliver Stone, did Born on the Fourth of July andPlatoon and Wall Street and Salvador and JFK, as well as a 10-part series for Showtime called The Untold History of the United States, now out in DVD form with two extra chapters. Our guest also, Peter Kuznick, who co-wrote the book and worked—co-authored the series, a history professor at American University. Peter Kuznick, what this next chapter looks like today, what we are experiencing today in the United States?

PETER KUZNICK: It’s a continuation of the trends that Oliver and I were talking about from the 1890s up to the present. We had a lot of hope for Obama when he was elected in 2008. I guess we were somewhat naive, because Obama, rather than breaking with the patterns of American empire and American militarism, has continued most of them. Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary, said that this is actually George W. Bush’s fourth term that we’re experiencing now. And in some ways that’s true, and disappointingly so. Obama, from the beginning, surrounded himself with very, very conservative advisers. His economic team was considered — The New York Times called them a constellation of Rubinites, followers of Robert Rubin. His military team, his defense policy, foreign policy, were mostly hawks—people like Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, General Jones—and his policies have reflected that.

Oliver and I see him as simply a more efficient manager of the American empire, not somebody who’s breaking with the empire. He doesn’t even think in different terms. For example, he recently called for a 13-year commemoration of the Vietnam War, in which we’re going to reposition our understanding of the Vietnam War. And that’s very, very dangerous. A recent poll showed that 51 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds now think that the Vietnam War was worth fighting, see the Vietnam War as an American interest. Those people our age, about 70 percent say the Vietnam War was a mistake or even worse. But the fact that younger people are not learning history and are seeing the Vietnam War in more positive light is symptomatic of what Oliver and are concerned about, that people’s understanding of history is distorted in such a way as to perpetuate the trends that we find very, very objectionable.

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TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2013

Oliver Stone on His Next Project, a Martin Luther King Jr. Biopic with Jamie Foxx

Director, producer and screenwriter Oliver Stone discusses his next project, a biographical film of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. starring Jamie Foxx. Stone is writing the film with the cooperation of the King estate. "He was our Gandhi," Stone says. "He spoke out not only for civil rights, but when he crossed over, against militarism, greed, and the Vietnam War." Stone has made nearly two dozen films, winning three Academy Awards. Most recently, Stone has co-written the 10-part Showtime series "Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States."

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Oliver Stone, talk about this next project that you are involved with.

OLIVER STONE: Well, I’ve been writing the screenplay for the Martin Luther King story, with the cooperation of the estate. I can’t say for sure it’s going to happen. I really hope so. Jamie Foxx is very interested, and I’m—I’ve worked with Jamie before, and I think he can do a hell of a job as King. I want to tell a story about a man who was a great American, I think, right? He was in—he was our Gandhi. He was as close as I know to an American Gandhi, and a non—believed in nonviolence, but a strong nonviolent resistance. He spoke out not only for civil rights, but when he crossed over and he spoke out against militarism and greed and the Vietnam War, he made many more enemies. And he became a very strong and important character because he was merging this huge civil rights movement with the anti-Vietnam movement. He pointed out very clearly that colored soldiers were fighting in disproportionate numbers in Vietnam and killing colored people over there, whereas they could not get decent treatment or education at home. He made that famous quote, remember, about spending $320,000 to kill every single Vietnam soldier—that’s what it cost us—and we were spending $50 at home for anybody who was poor. And he was saying this is crazy, and a nation that has these priorities is doomed to a spiritual death.

AMY GOODMAN: So you had King dealing with Kennedy 50 years ago—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —in the 1963 March on Washington and then moving on to deal with LBJ to get the Voting Rights and the Civil Rights Act passed.

OLIVER STONE: Right, right. Yeah, a lot—you know, and I think we have to give some—not much credit is always given to Kennedy, but his death did motivate a lot of that—that feeling that we had to pass the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act. But King fought for it, and Johnson, that was his best side. Johnson did—we have to give him credit for backing him on that.

AMY GOODMAN: Sadly, it was U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy who ultimately approved a wiretap on Dr. King. Maybe we can take that, from that moment decades ago, to what we’re seeing today, not just on leading dissident figures, but on all Americans—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —and, it looks like, on most world leaders, enemy or ally.

OLIVER STONE: Well, you have to say pre-Robert Kennedy. J. Edgar Hoover of theFBI had been very interested in civil rights leaders going back to the 1930s. He bugged them. And he had been—he always thought that the civil rights movement was controlled by Moscow. And he thought the Vietnam students who were protesting against the war were controlled by Moscow. He had informants in all these groups. Hoover represents this—by the way, Hoover goes back to 1919, Woodrow Wilson era, and he was involved in the Palmer raids. He believed—that we deported many leftists in 1919.

AMY GOODMAN: Including Emma Goldman and others.

OLIVER STONE: Including Emma Goldman and Big Bill Haywood. It was—you know, we’ve always had a fear of communism that was disproportionate to what their real threat to us was. And before the revolution, by the way, the propertied—the propertied classes always fear labor.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what has replaced that now, this term "national security," that justifies—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —the mass surveillance of Americans and people all over the world.

OLIVER STONE: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: This is under President Obama.

OLIVER STONE: Absolutely. Well, this is an old issue, too. Historically, terrorists—you know, Harry Truman in 1947, the Truman Doctrine, he declared boldly on the floor of Congress that we had to invest $400 million in Greece and Turkey to defeat outside forces. He included terrorists and communists as destabilizing Greece. These are the people, by the way, who fought for the independence of Greece against the Nazis. They became terrorists right away. So, the word "terrorist" has been used very loosely to describe whatever enemy. If you read George Orwell, 1984, the government exists—it’s justified because of terrorists. There are always terrorists in the woodwork.

There are—yes, there are terrorists in the world. They are vile. We should track them down, ad doc, selectively, specifically. Glenn Greenwald has been very articulate about this. You know somebody or has connections to terrorism, I think most people would back that. But when you put the whole thing out over the web and you say everybody in the world is—are potentially suspect, you’re making a different kind of world. You’re making that horrible world that George Bush described when he said, "You’re either with us, or you’re against us." I don’t want to live in that world.

AMY GOODMAN: But either way, you’re being surveilled.

OLIVER STONE: Eigher way, yeah. You have to prove you’re innocent, so to speak.

AMY GOODMAN: So—

OLIVER STONE: I worry about my children about that, and I worry about the future, because Obama, as Peter said, is an intelligent manager. I don’t believe he’s an unreasonable man. I don’t even think he knows exactly what’s going on. But I do fear a situation where if we have another terrorist attack, what’s going to happen? And then, what if we have another Bush as a president, or a right-winger? You know, this is the—the technology in place—

AMY GOODMAN: Would it be very different? As Ari Fleischman [ sic ] said, the spokesperson for President Bush, that President Obama—as Ali Fleischer says, the former spokesperson for President George W. Bush, President Obama is a continuation of what President Bush was doing.

OLIVER STONE: Obama doesn’t have—you know, what I said about vision earlier, about Roosevelt and Kennedy and Wallace, these are bigger men. I mean, I don’t think Obama was given a mandate in 2008. He could have done something. He could have been a Roosevelt. People were comparing him to Roosevelt at that time. He didn’t run with it. He hired—as Peter said, he put Clinton in, and he put Gates in, the economic team from Rubin. I don’t get it. Why didn’t he take his moment? He blew it.

And by doing that, because so many young people, so many people campaigned for him, and he disbanded that organization—that was a grassroots organization he disbanded—he took the hope away from those people who believed that democracy was still possible. You call the show Democracy Now! I was thinking about that. That should be a question mark. You know, you have an exclamation point.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you consider making a film about Edward Snowden?

OLIVER STONE: I think he’d be a terrific subject. Frankly, I don’t know that I can handle it, because there’s so much incoming news. I think Snowden had been very smart, and he’s done the best he can under most difficult circumstances.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Oliver Stone, I want to thank you very much for being with us. We’re going to continue this conversation after the broadcast, and we’ll post it at democracynow.org. This is—this month is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King [ sic ]. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick—of Martin Luther—of John F. Kennedy.

OLIVER STONE: Another one.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s right, 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.

OLIVER STONE: And Robert Kennedy was killed a few months later.

AMY GOODMAN: The Untold History of the United States is Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s collaboration, both the book and the multi-part Showtime series, now available on DVD.

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NOVEMBER 05, 2013

Part 3: Oliver Stone on His Visit to Jeju Island, NSA Protests, Impact of Social Justice Movements

We continue our extended interview with three-time Academy Award-winning director, producer and screenwriter Oliver Stone. He discusses recent NSAprotests, his recent visit to Jeju Island in South Korea to join protests against a planned naval base to house a U.S. missile defense system close to China, and more about the assassination of JFK and his series, The Untold History of the United States.

See part 1 and 2 of this interview.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Our guest is Oliver Stone, three-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker, famous for many films. Among them—well, he was a Vietnam War veteran—he did Platoon; Born on the Fourth of July; Wall Street; Salvador; Nixon; W. about George W. Bush; South of the Border, a documentary about Latin American leaders; Wall Street and Wall Street 2. Well, now, a commemorative edition of his film JFK has just come out on Blu-ray as the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination approaches, November 22nd. Most recently, Oliver Stone co-wrote a 10-part Showtime series called Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, which played on Showtime. Now it’s available on Blue-ray with two extra chapters. He has a book and the many-part series.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Oliver.

OLIVER STONE: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: You recently went to Jeju Island. Now, most people who are listening have no idea where that is, but it’s in South Korea. You went there in August, World Heritage site, where the government wants to build a naval base to house a U.S. missile defense system close to China. Earlier this year, I spoke with one of those leading the fight against this base. Kang Dong-kyun is the mayor of Gangjeong, a village on Jeju Island in South Korea. Mayor Kang has been arrested many times. He spoke to us through a translator.

MAYOR KANG DONG-KYUN: [translated] The base that’s being build on Jeju Island will not only be used by the South Korean government, but the United States also will be using this base. According to the Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and South Korea, the U.S. military base will also use this base. So if this base is completed, I worry that it will lead to another Cold War. So when President Obama meets with Chinese leaders, I hope they will discuss treating each other not through a contest of force, but through peaceful, diplomatic engagement. The major powers have to reduce their military budgets, and in order to do that, they should start by getting rid of military bases on geostrategic islands like Jeju and Okinawa. I hope the U.S. and Chinese governments can make a peace agreement to bring about global peace, resolve problems not through war, but through dialogue and mutual understanding, so that Jeju Islanders and people of the whole planet can live as dignified human beings in harmony with nature.

AMY GOODMAN: That is the mayor of a village on Jeju Island called Gangjeong. Mayor Kang has been arrested many times as he protests the U.S. base that will be built there. Now, why, Oliver Stone, did you go to Jeju Island?

OLIVER STONE: I was on a trip to Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Okinawa, in conjunction with Untold History and commemorating the site of the atomic bombs. So I went to South Korea in addition, because it’s part of the same problem. The United States’s ax—pivot to Asia involves going—once again going back into our Asian positions, which we never gave up after World War II. We held onto Japan, and eventually South Korea, and we armed these countries to the teeth. Now we’ve armed the Philippines. We’ve armed—we’ve made an alliance with Vietnam. Taiwan, we armed with the most sophisticated stealth fighters we have, subs, everything. And Australia—we have troops in Australia. We’re ringing the Chinese border, as we have rung around—have now put NATO bases around Russia. It’s part of our global expansion, and we—to control the world.

So, our mouths are drooling, because one of the best deep-water ports in the world is in Jeju, which is a lovely island, by the way. It’s called—I believe it’s called "the island of peace," is the nickname for it on—a World Heritage site, some of the best waters in the world, beautiful fishing and so forth. And it’s a beauty spot. And, of course, in the heart of this, next to this poor village, where this mayor is very civil, is they’re putting up the ugliest base you’ve ever seen. Every day for five years now, they’ve been building it. Protests have been steady. The nuns, the priests, many of them Catholic, are out there, day by day. The South Koreans are in charge of the base. The Americans have a behind-the-scenes policy. But essentially it’s a deep-water port where we will be able to dock the George Washington aircraft carrier carrying all kinds of nuclear missiles, anti-ballistic missiles. It’s a state-of-the-art aircraft.

AMY GOODMAN: You went to—

OLIVER STONE: And I—one more thing I just want to point out. It’s very important to realize that this is less than 400 kilometers from Shanghai. This is very close. This is really front-line warfare here. I just want to make you aware of how much electronic eavesdropping we can do from this place. We, of course, have huge bases in Japan and Okinawa, but this is a big new advance. I’m sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: You went to a prison there and visited Yang Yoon-mo in the prison—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —who has been in prison—is the longest-held prisoner protesting this right now.

OLIVER STONE: Is that right?

AMY GOODMAN: Why did you go there?

OLIVER STONE: Yeah. Well, I went—

AMY GOODMAN: To visit him?

OLIVER STONE: I was on the island, and I was introduced to him. He’s a film critic. He was a film critic; he’s not practicing right now. And he was one of the leading lights, and he felt very strongly—Korean people are very emotional about this. This is a—you know, they believe in ancestors, and the burial grounds, there’s a lot of ghosts, a feeling of that. And it’s in their movies. It’s in their culture. This is an island that’s sacred to them. And to use it for this kind of a military is irreligious. It’s—people feel very strongly, and they fight for it. And this guy has been in jail off and on many times, and I believe he’s had hunger fasts of 60 days, 50 days. I was worried for him. He looks good, but—and he’s in that vein of people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

AMY GOODMAN: Oliver Stone, what do you think is the—was the most dangerous time in U.S. history, in the period that you have—you have covered in Untold History of the United States?

OLIVER STONE: I think—to be honest, I think the 1960, when Eisenhower had reached that brink, full brink of that—we had that kind of power over the rest of the world. We were 10-to-one over the Soviet Union, 1960 to ’63, when Kennedy inherited that position. It was because of the Cuba and the Berlin situation. And then, after that, I think the Vietnam War, but that was regional.

But then, I think, with Reagan in office and Andropov—Andropov was shocked. In 1983, '84, very close again. Remember when the Korean jetliner went down? There were several miscalculations in that period. And Americans don't know much about it, but there was—we had—we were—Reagan was talking a very aggressive game. He was talking about first strike. He was talking about anti-ballistic missiles. The Soviets were freaked out. They really believe us, the contrary to our own people. They really believed it. And they thought—there was a couple of near accidents when they thought we had launched already. Andropov stopped at the last second. So, there—and then again, in Yeltsin’s period, there was a few mishaps, as you know, but not as dangerous as when Reagan was talking that type of game.

And now, now is very dangerous, because we are back on top, full-spectrum dominance. We have the most deadly capabilities from space, which we are increasing day by day. By 2015, 2020, we should have drones up there. And we don’t sign onto the space treaty that the Soviets and the Chinese want. So, space, cyberwarfare, we’re the leader. Whatever we say about the Chinese, we are the leader. And, of course, cyber—cyberwarfare, space warfare, land, air, sea, full—and now eavesdropping—full-spectrum dominance. This is—when you have first strike ability, you tend to use it. You have to be very careful. That’s what the danger was in 1960. The generals wanted to use it, get rid of the enemy now.

AMY GOODMAN: Oliver Stone, talk about these two projects that you are now just releasing. You’ve got the film, JFK, but the—you’re not just releasing a Blu-ray DVD. You have this limited edition of this box set. Talk about what’s inside.

OLIVER STONE: Well, the—there’s three documentaries, as well as the orginal movie, that was not a great movie, but it’s fun to watch, is PT 109with Cliff Robertson. It was made in 1960 with Cliff Robertson, very good, but not a great movie. The director’s cut with about 28 extra minutes.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what you mean by the director’s cut of JFK.

OLIVER STONE: Well, it’s—I released a movie in 1991 that was three hours and nine minutes. This is about three hours and 28 minutes, I believe. So, I have some scenes in there that—because, you know, a DVD, you can watch it at your own pace, it’s a different style than when you want to do it in one theater once. So I added some scenes, including the Johnny Carson show where Garrison went, etc.

Also, what’s very interesting is this Chapter Six is in this box. This is—

AMY GOODMAN: And Chapter Six is the chapter six of Untold History.

OLIVER STONE: Chapter Six is from The Untold History, which is the Kennedy chapter and explains nothing—it doesn’t go into the assassination, because that’s—that is still speculation; we can’t—this is history and documentary, but this goes into all the reasons and the motives for why people might want to get rid of him and eliminate him.

AMY GOODMAN: Hmm. And you have?

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, this is a—you know, the inaugural address, some pictures and a photo correspondence book from the Kennedy Library, and I think here quotations. Look at that. Quotations.

AMY GOODMAN: So this is a limited 50,000 edition pack of this series—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, nice.

AMY GOODMAN: —that includes JFK, with your director’s cut. And then, at the same time, you’re releasing the Showtime series on Blu-ray DVD, together with the book, Oliver Stone—of course, the book has come out in paperback—with two extra chapters. Talk about the series.

OLIVER STONE: Well, we—it was shown from—on Showtime last year. We started with World War II because we thought that was more accessible to the popular market. The other—the first two chapters go from 1898 to 1940, and they’re very interesting. They set up World War II. And because it’s a whole new set of characters that may not be familiar to people from the World War II era, we decided to lead with our stronger—you know, lead with World War II. But I’m very happy these two chapters are in, because World War I sets up World War II, and you need to know about. And also, in 1898, that’s when America started to really change, because we go on—abroad, looking for markets, under McKinley. The election of 1900 resembles, to some degree, the election of 2000.

AMY GOODMAN: Hmm. I want to go to Reagan. You were just talking about President Reagan. In your book, Untold History of the United States, you have a chapter called "Death Squads for Democracy."

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: This is President Reagan in 1983 giving an address on Central America.

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: [But nearness on the map doesn’t even begin to tell] the strategic importance of Central America, bordering as it does on the Caribbean, our lifeline to the outside world. Two-thirds of all our foreign trade and petroleum pass through the Panama Canal and the Caribbean. In a European crisis, at least half of our supplies for NATO would go through these areas by sea.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Reagan.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah. It’s interesting you went to a 1983 clip, and that—I was saying that it was the most—one of the most dangerous era. There was a sense that we could almost go to war, because he called them the "evil empire," and he kept taunting them. He was—he realized, at one point—Reagan saw that movie that was on TV, The Day After Tomorrow, which apparently moved him, because he saw that a nuclear war would be pointless and nobody would really be happy with this outcome, and he changed his policy. Also, there was the nuclear freeze movement. Do you remember? There were huge protests. People in America got fed up with this talk and actually went—Randy—what was her name? Randy Fozberg [ sic ]—

AMY GOODMAN: Forsberg, yeah.

OLIVER STONE: —a woman, led this, started this thing.

AMY GOODMAN: He actually met Helen Caldicott. Patti Davis—

OLIVER STONE: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: —his daughter, took him—took Helen Caldicott, the leading anti-nuclear physician, to meet with President Reagan.

OLIVER STONE: And they—there was a movement, and it was—Reagan was affected by it. So it showed you that popular demonstrations could have an effect, like they had on Nixon, too, on the Vietnam War.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about that, because you chronicle leaders, but you also talk about—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —these movements.

OLIVER STONE: Well, some movements have really had an impact. You know, labor had a huge impact, and now, unfortunately, that’s been—largely because of Reagan, it’s been—lost a lot of its impact. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the Vietnam War protests affected Nixon deeply. He gauged the degree of bombing to the amount of protest. And, of course, he never could lick it. He never could get around what he wanted. But he was—he would have gone further probably if he had not been pressured by the students.

In the present day, I can think of the Iraq—the Iraq War protests were significant. They were worldwide. Unfortunately, Bush is a hardhead and went ahead, and we backed him. The country—the leading power elite of this country backed him. But it was an important protest. I was very heartened to see last—two weeks ago, there was a protest against the NSA, not a large protest, but a beginnings of showing that people still have a conscience and are willing to walk the streets. We’ve got to get out and get away from our Internets and get out there, too, and get on the streets. We have to show some—some bodies. Although sometimes it might not look like it’s working, who knows? You know, you have to—you have to stand up for your conscience, and it makes a difference.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we wrap up, I wanted to go back to where we began, with JFK, on this 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. This is a moment in your film when the nation learns of the assassination of President Kennedy.

JIM GARRISON: [played by Kevin Costner] What’s wrong, Lou?

LOU IVON: [played by Jay O. Sanders] Boss, the president’s been shot. In Dallas, five minutes ago.

JIM GARRISON: Oh, no! How bad?

LOU IVON: There’s no word yet, but they think it’s in the head.

JIM GARRISON: Come on. Napoleon’s has a TV set.

NEWS ANCHOR: Apparently, three bullets were found. Governor Connally also appeared to have been hit. The president was rushed by Secret Service to Parkland Memorial Hospital, four miles from Dealey Plaza. We are told a bullet entered the base of the throat and came out of the back side, but there is no confirmation. Blood transfusions are being given. A priest has administered the last rights.

JIM GARRISON: There’s still a chance, damn it. Come on, Jack. Pull through.

WALTER CRONKITE: From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago. Vice President Lyndon Johnson has left the hospital. Presumably, he will be taking the oath of office shortly and become the 36th president of the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, that was Walter Cronkite announcing the death of President Kennedy in the film, Oliver Stone’s JFK. Who did kill JFK, do you think? Who were the forces involved?

OLIVER STONE: In history, we talk about the forces that were—who had hated him. And he took on—he fired the head of the CIA, who was—had carte blanche in Washington. That was Allen Dulles. He was a brother of John Foster Dulles, who was the very all-powerful secretary of state for Eisenhower. He launched coups and interventions in many countries, most successfully in Iran and in Guatemala. But he did try in Indonesia to get rid of Sukarno, who was one of the leading neutralists of the time. Dulles said that neutrality was immoral, and—because people were trying to live between the Soviet Union and the United States. Eisenhower was very embarrassed by the Indonesian—they found a CIA pilot. Typical story, you know, like the Reagan story. This CIA pilot was found, Allen Pope. And then, after that, they—in Vietnam, we supported the French. We also undermined the peace agreement, worked against it, so that there were no elections in Vietnam to solve that problem in 1950—a lot of bad stuff. Angola. We tried to poison Patrice Lumumba. We failed, but he was killed by other forces. But we were—

AMY GOODMAN: In the Congo.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah, but we must—we play a large role, of course, in supporting the Belgians there. There was also many others we don’t have time to get into. But Eisenhower was—although he looked like a grandfather, he was all over the place. He was—he didn’t believe in Third World freedom. He didn’t believe in the concept that colonialism could be defeated. Eisenhower was into the money, the Republican Party, maintaining our hold on the resources of the world. He always talked about the domino theory: If Vietnam went, we would lose Japan, etc., none of which happened, but a big believer in rolling back communism.

AMY GOODMAN: Lee Oswald was killed—

OLIVER STONE: He was killed. He said, "I’m a patsy."

AMY GOODMAN: —by Jack Ruby.

OLIVER STONE: "I’m just a patsy." We show—we have numerous clips of him stating that to the press. He didn’t know what he was held for. He told—he had been told he had murdered an officer, which he claimed not to have done. And there’s ample evidence, we believe, that he wasn’t even at that site, because it was geographically too far away at that time. It’s disgusting. I mean, it’s the guy who has to be killed before he can get to a press conference. He was on his way to a long press conference.

AMY GOODMAN: And the man who killed him, Jack Ruby?

OLIVER STONE: Jack Ruby was a mob-related guy in big trouble with them. He owed the IRS like $140 grand, and he—that was—they say that was the reason that he was forced to do this. And he was known to the Dallas police. He had access, and he got in. It was a corrupt police force. And they never kept a record of what Oswald said, you know, that—all the records of what Oswald was talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah. Well, Oswald was trying to reach a legal—he was trying to reach out for a lawyer. He says it in one of his press conference, brief one in the corridor. He said, "Will someone out there"—he wanted to reach this guy in New York.

AMY GOODMAN: And he said, "I’m a patsy."

OLIVER STONE: He tried to get the ONI office, the Office of Naval Intelligence in—I believe it was in South Carolina. And they—he had a long phone conversation. One of those—we’d love to know that file. And the second call was unreturned, to the ONI.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain the nexus of intelligence—

OLIVER STONE: Office of Naval Intelligence, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —right, ONI—

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —right next to the CIA. Explain—

OLIVER STONE: Well, that’s another thing. There’s so many ends. Yeah, ONIwas in New Orleans in that square next to where the FBI, the CIA were. ONIwas a very old-fashioned, loyal—Banister was an ONI guy. Banister—there’s too many names to go through, but ONI had—may well have been the guy who—but what’s really very current and fresh is Jeff Morley of the—ex-Washington Post, who’s onto this. You know, he’s—the CIA swore the Assassination Records Review Board that they were holding still like 1,200-1,100 documents about some CIA people that are of great interest. And these are thousands of pages. They are about people like James Jesus Angleton. Angleton was the head of counterintelligence. He was a very weird, interesting figure. Dulles, although he had been fired from government, was still a god to these people. He was the man. He’d been fired by Kennedy. He called Kennedy: "That son of a bitch thinks he’s a god. That little son of a bitch thinks he’s a god." Angleton was a guy inside the government who could pull off things. Ed Lansdale is another interesting character who, many people, Fletcher Prouty included, believe, was at the assassination that day, because there’s a picture that is—many people believe, is him there. The—James Angleton; Richard Helms, deputy director, is another one who Morley would like to have a file on; George Joannides, the Miami station chief; David Phillips, the Mexico City chief; Anne Goodpasture; E. Howard Hunt and David Morales. These two, last two, were, by their own admission, seem to be involved in—and on their deathbeds were saying that they were very proud of the fact that they got rid of Kennedy, had been part of that.

AMY GOODMAN: And you got to film right in—

OLIVER STONE: But we can’t get the files on those people.

AMY GOODMAN: Because they’re still closed.

OLIVER STONE: Yeah. And Mr. Harvey. Don’t forget William Harvey, who was head of the Miami station until he was fired because he hated Kennedy. He was another Curtis LeMay of his time, so much was drunk, they got rid of him. But he was a very interesting character. You were asking? I’m sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: You filmed in Dallas. They let you.

OLIVER STONE: Dallas, we filmed—Dallas, yes, we got into Dallas at that time, by the skin of our teeth. We got Dealey Plaza. And we—they were—we had a—yeah, we shot on the seventh floor, I believe, but we—because there was a museum, but that’s—it’s a good reproduction. And we talked to—you know, at the end of the day, we must have talked to 75 or a hundred people who were there that day. So, we have as good a record as anyone of having—

AMY GOODMAN: And to those who criticize you, like Anthony Lewis, right? The late Anthony Lewis of The New York Times — 

OLIVER STONE: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —who said, quote, "Every specific charge made in the movie similarly ignores extensive, for me dispositive, evidence. It gives weight to witnesses long since discredited. It does not mention the scientific findings that Oswald’s gun fired the bullets that hit President Kennedy and Gov. John Connally." And more recently, Chicago Tribune published an article by Cory Franklin, who wrote, quote, "'JFK' is powerful. However, it is far removed from historical accuracy. Whatever Stone’s motives, the movie is full of distortions and outright falsehoods. The result features real historical characters in a crime-fiction fantasy, essentially a propaganda piece meant to demonize a covert, evil, right-wing paramilitary group." Your response to that last comment, Oliver Stone?

OLIVER STONE: I—you know, I just have to sit down, ad hoc, be specific. Let’s go over the bullets. Let’s go over the wounds. Let’s go—I mean, I’d like to sit with my—I’d like to have two experts with me, and we’ll talk with anybody who comes. Vincent Bugliosi has written this book, huge amount of pages. But he’s a prosecutor, and he’s gone about it as a prosecutor. But I think Robert Groden and Cyril Wecht could argue him down, and Gary Aguilar. These are good people, and they have no—there’s no profit in this. They’re doing it because they care. These are only citizens. I don’t know what Lewis’s bug is, but I know that Lewis, when the Warren Commission came out, which is huge, he approved it right away. You know, he didn’t—I don’t know that he really examined the case that they were presenting.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us. JFKnow comes out in a limited edition Blu-ray, as well as little pamphlets, books and more.

OLIVER STONE: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Kevin Costner in JFK, made by Oliver Stone. Also, his series, The Untold History of the United States both in book and in DVDform.

FILED UNDER  Web Exclusive, Film, National Security Agency

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