JFK

I recently sat down and watched Oliver Stone’s JFK for the first time. It’s one of those movies I had seen pieces of as a kid on TBS or some other superstation on Sunday afternoons, and I was aware of it as an artifact since certain scenes have been homage’d or parodied often over the years. Donald Sutherland’s DC park bench monologue, Kevin Costner’s “back, and to the left” courtroom breakdown of the Zapruder film, etc. But to watch the three-hour epic all the way through decades after its 1991 release was an odd experience not only because of its dramatic content, but because of the way the film marks a profound schism as regards the Left’s cultural and political relationship to the security state. Or as it’s more commonly called nowadays, the “Deep State.”

The film is pretty good. Stone as a filmmaker is nothing if not sincere — there’s little subtlety here, plenty of script-as-screed writing, and absolute certainly as to the righteousness of the storytelling. It’s the work of a man who has found the cache to make his dream project and is pouring every piece of himself into it. The story focuses on the investigation by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) into the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. Garrison’s indictment and trial of effete Big Easy business mogul Clay Shaw is to date the only trial of anyone for the assassination of the president. Lee Harvey Oswald, the presumed lone assassin, was himself gunned soon after the event. Shaw’s trial ended in an acquittal.

Stone’s script essentially follows Garrison’s findings and clearly agrees with the thesis, since he presents events as more or less dramatized fact. The basic outline of the assassination theory is as follows.

Kennedy had made himself an enemy of the United states defense establishment, especially the CIA, whose fevered ambitions to depose Fidel Castro in Cuba were thwarted by Kennedy following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962. Kennedy and his brother Robert sought to reign in the power of the CIA, FBI, and other arms of the national security state and the military industrial complex, and they planned to take the United States out of Vietnam. So factions at high levels of the agencies conspired to have him killed. In the context of this plot, Lee Harvey Oswald was just one of numerous assassins in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He served as the patsy once Kennedy was dead, and then a mob-connected goon named Jack Ruby was tasked with taking him out to tie up the loose end. Garrison’s investigation in New Orleans zeroed in on a CIA cell in the Big Easy accused of taking part in this plot, which included among others Shaw, Oswald, and a Louisiana pilot named David Ferrie — a potential state witness who wound up dead right before Shaw’s trial.

Though Shaw was acquitted in less than an hour — and though Garrison used the trial more as a theater stage to present his theory of the assassination rather than to field a solid case against Show - various pieces fell into place over the years to buttress some of Garrison’s (and ergo Stone’s) claims. It was confirmed years later that Clay Shaw was indeed a CIA asset, which made sense considering his connections to shipping in Latin America. Lee Harvey Oswald, while never confirmed to have been a CIA agent, was confirmed to have been in Louisiana in the company of likely CIA agents, in addition to his intriguing visits to the Soviet Union in the years before Kennedy’s death. In 1993, PBS Frontline obtained a group photo that confirmed that Oswald and David Ferrie had served in the same Civil Air Patrol squadron, and likely knew each other. As for Jack Ruby, the man who killed Oswald, he had a mountain of gambling debts that seemed to disappear after Oswald was dead.

A lot of circumstantial evidence to be sure, but when you’re dealing with intelligence agencies, circumstantial is usually what you have to work with. And it can still lead you to some version of the truth. The Warren Commission that formed the primary “official” investigation into the Kennedy assassination was rife with spooks and FBI agents, and seemed determined to ignore or cover up key pieces of evidence that pointed away from Oswald as the lone gunman. The U.S. House of Representatives likewise felt the Warren Commission insufficient, and in 1976 assembled the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Some of the evidence they reviewed — including an additional civilian video that backed up the odd bullet trajectories suggested by the Zapruder film — mysteriously vanished in the years that followed, but they still came to the conclusion that the assassination was probably the result of a conspiracy. They didn’t opine much as to who might be involved.

Hy hunch is that Stone’s theory is at least spiritually correct. By that I mean that while the specific details and connections and rabbit holes he pursues in the construction of his dramatized account may not be exactly true, the idea that the entrenched network of security agencies and connected business interests that made up the “military industrial complex” felt threatened enough by Kennedy to remove him does sound reasonable. It speaks to motive, and fits with a lot of the scattered bits of evidence that made the whole thing feel institutionally involved, including strange stand-down orders and redeployments of Secret Service assets in Dallas.

But regardless of who exactly killed Kennedy, the theory itself is important because it speaks to something true — that something very new in the American experience had formed in the decades following the Second World War. President Eisenhower, the most prominent military figure during that conflict, chose to exit the White House in 1961 with a warning about this novel creature, which he dubbed the “Military Industrial Complex,” because in it he saw an extralegal entity that had formed outside of public accountability, a vast and ever-growing web of defense contractors and unelected security bureaucrats in permanent agencies who saw themselves as outside of traditional American governance. This monster may have been born out of necessity — the pressures of the Cold War nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union called for rules that went around traditional legislative action due to time constraints. But by the dawn of the 1960s it was clear that this monster could not be unmade. It had become conscious in the uncanny way human systems can become conscious, and it would defend itself against any effort to roll back it’s power. Violently if necessary.

Viewed in context, JFK’s assassination makes sense as a rational response by this newly constituted security state. He and his brother were discussing dismantling J. Edger Hoover’s FBI, and Kennedy was reported to have told administration officials following the Bay of Pigs disaster that he wanted to “splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Powerful people at high levels across the intelligence establishment had considered Kennedy a naive WASP schoolboy before he took office, and now he was presenting as a threat to the very existence of their power centers. So yeah, the idea that they would have him removed doesn’t seem far-fetched. And besides, by the 1960s they were becoming quite skilled at that kind of thing as they sponsored assassinations and coups all over the world.

It’s worth nothing that resistance to the military industrial complex’s influence would dwindle in successive administrations. Lyndon Johnson, a CIA asset who had helped illegally run guns to Israel with grapefruit trucks while governor of Texas, was pushed aside in 1968 as the Vietnam War went sideways. Then came Richard Nixon, who aggressively pushed for a drawdown in Vietnam before his landslide reelection in 1972. Feeling vigorous off his overwhelming population mandate, he turned his eye toward rolling back several sectors of the bureaucratic state, and prepared a mass reassessment of employees across all the security agencies. He would avoid the fate of Kennedy, but he would still be forced from office by a fairly insignificant scandal leaked to the Washington Post by an insider labeled “Deep Throat,” who turned out to be an unctuous FBI apparatchik named Mark Felt. Succeeding administrations would all fall in line within the security state’s parameters, even those of “change” agents like Raegan and Obama. The CIA even got one of their own in the White House in former agency director George H. W. Bush.

Then came Donald Trump.

Last year was the 30th anniversary of JFK’s release, and with that came a torrent of articles connecting the film to current “right-wing conspiracy theories.” They drew a direct line from Oliver Stone’s deep skepticism of the security state to the “Q-Anon” phenomenon and the possible connection of the Comet Ping Pong pizza joint to a satanic D.C. pedophile ring. Stone was lumped in with these Current Year regime opponents, whom the left-wing authors of the articles consider wacky paranoids at best and existential security threats at worst. Stone must have been baffled. The lifelong leftist found himself still at odds with the American regime, but that regime now appeared as something very different than it had during his days as a young radical filmmaker in the 1980s.

There stood the traditional pillars of the liberal project — the news media, the film industry, and Democratic Party machine - arrayed to label him one of the progenitors of this new wave of fiery anti-establishment skepticism. And there with them — not even behind them, but often right out in from with them — stood the ever more deeply entrenched machinery of the American security state. The FBI. The private defense contractors. The CIA.

I can sympathize with the whiplash Stone may have felt. I came of age during the George W. Bush administration, and got involved in left-wing politics on my college campus during the Iraq War. We spoke of the security state in the language of Stone and Chompsky, and would fill late hours working each other up with tales of sordid CIA plots and coups and assassinations — Operation Artichoke in Cuba, the Gladio stay-behinds ops in Italy, the killing of Lumumba in the Congo. Standard introductory fare to 20th Century malfeasance by the intelligence community. We would get red talking about the perversity of the FBI, and the way they had evolved into a supranational agency beyond the true oversight and control of elected officials. But we talked about these things within what at the time seemed the “correct” frame. Military industrial complex and generally anything “mean” on the Right, resistance to that “mean” regime on the Left, and a bureaucracy that went about important “nonpolitical” work and served whoever won elections. But that Left-Right dichotomy had become a shell game. It gathered up votes for equally subservient clients, and for a long time seemed comfortable in its hidden-in-plain-sight dominion.

If the Trump Era was good for one thing, it was that it brought critical aspects of the American regime out into the light. Every arm of the security state and its permanent unelected bureaucracy went to work immediately after the 2016 election to undermine the administration of a duly elected President. This isn’t “conspiracy” thinking. They would brag about it openly. You could turn on CNN and see former CIA boss James Clapper assure Anderson Cooper that the President wouldn’t be allowed to do any harm. Those unelected heroes in the shadow agencies would defend Democracy, whatever that meant.

And so the heroes of the “Resistance” during Trump’s presidency were a parade of bureaucrats and spooks, from the clownish FBI agents who hopped onto Robert Mueller’s probe of the fabricated “Russian Collusion” plot, to the CIA agents who handed the testimony mic off to each other during Trump’s impeachment proceedings in Congress. Liberals inclined to fear Trump as the next Hitler cheered on this firebombing of an elected administration by all corners of the security state. But for those who, like me, gained their political sea-legs during those dark days of the mid-2000s, it was all quite disorienting. Though Stone hopped into the anti-Trump delirium along with the rest of the Hollywood establishment, I wonder if he sometimes felt the same sense of confusion.

That creature that Eisenhower warned of sixty years ago had only grown stronger, and for the first time in a while it felt truly threatened. Not so much by Trump himself - he would for the most part fall in line with regime parameters and shibboleths, and the creature didn’t care if Trump was “mean” or “sexist” or “racist.” No, it was concerned about the destabilizing energy Trump represented. This energy was rooted deep in the traditional American population, and it was quickly moving from skeptical of the institutions that ruled it to being openly hostile toward those institutions, which people were starting to see as alien and hostile towards them. This political energy could easily get to a point — many are already there — where they see no problem with dismantling the American security state wholesale, along with all other formal and informal gears of the United States’ imperial machine.

Trump was successfully shuffled off the stage in 2021, at least for the time being. Political figures are to some extent defined by their enemies, and in this sense, Trump may have found he had more common ground with JFK than he thought. Might be wise to tread carefully.