The Ressurection of Oliver Stone

A Congressional Oversight Committee Follows Stone into the JFK Conspiracy Abyss

Oliver Stone is a very talented film maker. He is also a terrible historian. I have often said, only partly in jest, that the only thing he got right in his 1991 JFK was the date on which Kennedy was killed.

Stone used as the narrative spine of his film the discredited and byzantine conspiracy theories of Jim Garrison, the late New Orleans District Attorney. I wrote about the Garrison fiasco in “Black is White, and White is Black,” chapter 18 of Case Closed. The utter fraud of the Garrison probe has been explored subsequently in excellent books (Patricia Lambert’s False Witness and Fred Litwin’s On the Trail of Delusion).

I thought that Stone had been relegated to the trash heap of history when it came to the JFK assassination.

I was mistaken. Last week in Skeptic magazine’s newsletter, I wrote “How MAGA is Reviving JFK Conspiracies for Political Theater.” My criticism was directed at Florida representative Anna Paulina Luna, who will lead an Oversight and Government Reform Committee public hearing on April 1 into the JFK assassination. She has already prejudged the case, telling podcasters and reporters that she believes there were two shooters.

What I did not know when I wrote that piece for Skeptic was that one of Luna’s key sources for her views about the case was none other than Oliver Stone.

That came to light last night, when Luna was on FOX News and made a startling announcement. Representative Luna said she had learned only last evening from Oliver Stone that NBC has a secret video that "shows Oswald near the vehicle [JFK's limo] when the assassination took place, which means that he couldn't have been the shooter." She disclosed that "director Stone" would be a key witnesses at her April 1 hearing. Luna claimed that NBC had for 62 years been "very, very much so guarding this tape." Stone told her that "this could blow open the entire JFK investigation." Not only did Luna ask NBC to produce the phantom exculpatory video but “encourage[d] everyone to ask NBC to release that tape to the public."

[Watch the video

There is a small problem with this tabloid breaking news.

It is not true.

There is no secret video that has been hidden from the public.

This is the supposedly smoking gun video Luna spoke about.

That video is available for anyone to watch at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas (or on their YouTube channel). What Rep. Luna is referring to is a clip of a film taken by Jimmy Darnell, an NBC affiliate cameraman who had been riding in the press camera cars behind the motorcade. He, and three other cameramen had jumped out of their car after the shots and started filming about 30 seconds after the assassination.

Darnell's film shows Dallas police officer Marrion Baker running to the front door of the Texas School Book Depository, and past the TSBD's supervisor, Roy Truly, both of whom would encounter Oswald in less than another 30 seconds, on the second floor. Oswald was on his way out of the building, having come down from the sixth floor after the shooting. Truly vouched for Oswald and Baker let him go.

Oliver Stone and others have now turned to the Darnell film and a few seconds that shows a figure on the far-left side of the front of the Texas School Book Depository. They believe that is Oswald. It is not even clear from the fuzzy image if it is absolutely a white man. It could even be a light-colored black or Latin person. But to Stone and Luna and others, it is Oswald. The figure has been dubbed prayer man, some say because of the way he has his arms crossed in front of him, while others think the conjecture is the equivalent of a conspiracy Hail Mary prayer long shot.

For those not into the weeds on the JFK assassination, this is not the first time that a film or photo has been used to try and exonerate Oswald. For many years, conspiracy theorists contended that Oswald was visible in one of the pictures taken by James Altgens, an AP photographer at the scene. Oswald, they contended, was the fuzzy figure in a white t-shirt standing to the left entrance of the TSBD.

That was in fact one of Oswald's coworkers, Billy Lovelady. Even AFTER Lovelady identified himself as the person in the photo, some conspiracy theorists refused to believe him.

Thirteen of Oswald’s work colleagues were standing at the front steps of the Texas School Book Depository. They were there to watch the motorcade. Not one of them remembers seeing Oswald there. That has not stopped the conspiracy theorists, who claim the clothing on the unidentified person in the Darnell film looks like what Oswald wore when he was arrested after killing Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit. Ten other Texas School Book Depository employees wore shirts like the one on “prayer man.”

The entire exercise might as well be a Rorschach inkblot test. That is what happened before in the case, for instance, with a half-inch square portion of Mary Moorman’s badly faded Polaroid taken a split second after the assassination. Conspiracy theorists enhanced it and blew it up and thought they had found the image of the phantom second shooter on the Grassy Knoll, someone they dubbed “badgeman.” They claimed that greatly enlarged pixels identified a rifle and a Dallas police uniform. The enhanced photo only shows shadows and trees, no person, no shooter.

Now, Oliver Stone and others believe the only thing preventing an ironclad identification of Oswald in the Darnell film is that they do not have the original first-generation. The Sixth Floor Museum has only a second-generation print of the film that the Museum acquired as part of a personal collection in 2006. No one is certain if a first-generation version exists, but the guess by Luna and Stone is that it must be somewhere in the long-lost archives at NBC. Not quite the same as NBC having, as Rep. Luna claimed, “very, very much guarding it.”

I hope that the Oversight Committee gets the original Darnell video. Many researchers would like to see the clearest possible version of the frenetic scenes that played out in the minutes after the assassination. For those, however, who think it will be dispositive and exculpatory evidence that Oswald was hanging out at the front of the School Book Depository, good luck. That story might earn a headline in the National Enquirer or the Daily Mail. It should not be the ‘breaking news’ from the congresswoman leading the new investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy.