Pssst: Give Stone an Oscar

Every year, because I'm a sucker for beautiful ladies in skimpy cocktail dresses, I go to the Academy Awards. And every year, it seems, I get into arguments defending Oliver Stone.

Not that he needs my help; his pictures usually win awards and he goes home in a studio limo while I spend half the night hunting for my Mercury Cougar. But I just can't resist the bait. When someone says that Stone is distorting history---or better yet, truth---something goes off inside me.

The argument really has nothing to do with Stone and his view of El Salvador, drugs, the Doors, Vietnam or Wall Street. It has to do with me scratching around as an investigative reporter dealing with lies in a country that for most of my life was blind-drunk on its official version of truth. I, too, had one of those conversations about the covert government similar to the one Kevin Costner has with Donald Sutherland in Stone's JFK.

It was a walk around Washington, D.C., in 1964 with then-Major General Edward Lansdale, the cowboy who at one point ran most of the CIA's covert operations. He was working out of the White House for L.B.J. under the cover of an operation called Food for Peace. He consented to see me because I had turned up with documents showing how ten years earlier he and the CIA had used an innocent-sounding Michigan State program of study in Vietnam as a front for training the secret police of Ngo Dinh Diem, the dictator we had installed as his country's president.

Lansdale, unlike the Sutherland character, was ever upbeat, his energies reinvigorated by the fact that the United States had moved from covert to overt action in Vietnam. My information on how the CIA installed Diem was irrelevant because that summer North Vietnam had attacked American naval ships in international waters off Vietnam. The infamous Tonkin Gulf resolution, passed nine months after Kennedy was killed, had permitted L.B.J. to commit 500,000 American troops to what had been transformed into an openly American war.

We didn't know until some 20 years later, again when the documents were finally forced out of the government, that the Gulf of Tonkin attack by North Vietnamese PT boats on American ships on August 4, 1964, was a fabrication. Captain John J. Herrick, the hapless commander of the destroyer Maddox, told me in 1985 that his crew had misidentified the signals of a newly installed sonar system bouncing off his ship's zigzagging rudder and said they were being attacked by enemy torpedoes. He figured out the mistake and alerted headquarters, but Johnson wouldn't wait for clarification and rushed instead to get on television before America went to bed to announce that American ships had been attacked. Details of that nefarious "attack" were broadcast widely by the American media and provided Lyndon Johnson with the pretext and Congressional resolution to escalate the Vietnam war.

At the time Kennedy was killed, there was a secret government centered in the intelligence agencies, expanding as rapidly as it could its ten-year-old covert action in Vietnam. The scope of the intrigue which enmeshed Kennedy in that war, and which Stone argues may have cost him his life, is still not fully known. When I was editing Ramparts magazine in the Sixties, we got as close as anyone to this story and we still proved to be naive about the scope of it, as later revealed in the Pentagon Papers and top-secret documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Hey, fellows, maybe we're all getting a bit establishment, but let's give Stone credit for poring over thousands of documents and other data leaked from the secret government while trying to make sense out of our old suspicions. Or is it best to leave history undisturbed?

Stone has been made the target of a smear campaign by those disagreeing not only with his movies but with his very right to make them. As long as his movies made money, by all that is logical in the world of capitalism, Stone seemed to be protected. But this time around he crossed some sacred line. In tones that hark back to the worst days of the Hollywood blacklist, Stone, who received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star in Vietnam, had his patriotism questioned by the likes of George Will and Patrick Buchanan, who did not serve in this war they supported so fervently. Journalists who presumably believe in the public's right to know seem eager to once again bury the case along with Stone. One writer, Bernard Weinraub, in what was ostensibly a news story for The New York Times, even suggests that Time-Warner is at fault because it failed to "exercise its leverage and blunt the highly charged message of a film maker like Oliver Stone." This is an unabashed call for corporate censorship on the part of a company that purchased and for a decade suppressed public showing of important evidence in the case: the Zapruder film.

Even before the movie was released, The Washington Post went after Stone on its editorial page with all guns blazing on the basis of an unapproved script. The New York Times went further and attacked those millions who bought tickets despite the dictates of the paper's totally negative reviews and op-ed pieces. In a front-page news story that read like a hysterical editorial, a Times reporter said, "After hundreds of books, dozens of documentaries and thousands of pages of Congressional testimony ... to the millions raised after Watergate whose verities have largely been cinematic, the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald could have acted alone seems too shocking to accept. Instead, many appear to have succumbed to Mr. Stone's Grand United Conspiracy Theory, a gaudy, frenetic fiction."

The idea here must be that young people who spend time at the movies instead of reading through Congressional testimony find it hard to accept the single-assassin theory and need to be protected from Stone. But as the endnote in JFK points out correctly, the two-year Congressional investigation of the incident concluded that there was a second gunman. If there was a second gunman and the Warren Commission rushed to conclude otherwise and most of its evidence has been ordered locked up until three decades into the next century, then it is fair game to suggest, which is all Stone's movie does, theories of the origins of the assassination team and subsequent cover-up.

Most of Stone's critics accept that the Warren Commission got it wrong but are furious with him for sympathetically telling the story through the eyes of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. They find particularly offensive Garrison's case against Clay Shaw, a New Orleans homosexual businessman who is linked in the movie with the CIA and through acquaintances in the gay community with the assassination effort.

This is the "lurid" conspiracy to which The New York Times was referring when its editorial warned: "The children of the video age get their information more from images than from words. . . . They tend to believe uncritically what they see. They'll swallow JFK whole." The editorial called instead for "reading, critically. Otherwise, Hollywood becomes the culture's historian by default." Well, let the record show that I am a print man, and the weekend that editorial ran, I finished reading an article by Diana Shaw in the Los Angeles Times Magazine called "The Temptation of Tom Dooley." Anyone who knows that story---which I originally broke in Ramparts---would not find Stone's "homosexual-CIA" axis so lurid.

Tom Dooley, those who were around in the Fifties will likely recall, was a Navy doctor stationed in Haiphong whose reports of North Vietnamese torture of Catholic priests and their followers were instrumental in rousing the American public to support U.S. intervention in Vietnam. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that without Dooley's inflammatory tales, which were covered extensively in virtually every major media outlet in this country, Oliver Stone and hundreds of thousands of American boys would never have been sent to that country.

Kennedy, who as a Senator and later as President had given voice to Dooley's charges, was probably unaware that the charges were largely fabricated and that Dooley was a CIA operative. I had heard that but, lacking the relevant documents, couldn't prove it. Nor did I particularly care to give credence to the rumors that had continually circulated, in print by Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper and elsewhere, that Dooley was a homosexual. I thought it was nobody's business. But it turns out that the CIA had made this fact very much a part of its business, as Shaw recounts in her article.

As the Los Angeles Times article indicated, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that Naval intelligence followed Dooley, taped his conversations in bars, shadowed him and his companions to hotel rooms and used this information to turn him into a helpless pawn of U.S. intelligence. By the time Dooley died in 1961, he had spent years running guns for the CIA to ostensibly neutral Laos. He was used to collect information and recruit agents for the CIA and, more important, to propagandize the American public on behalf of U.S. intervention.

So it is neither bizarre nor unprecedented for U.S. intelligence to blackmail homosexuals and involve them in a network of intrigue. Is this what happened to Clay Shaw, the man accused by Garrison in JFK? I bring this up now to challenge the easy arrogance of those who scoff at Stone's version of the truth, which, stripped of its speculative hyperbole, is simply that the Warren Commission covered up rather than investigated, and that the public now has a right to all of the relevant government documents in the case. The Dooley case only exemplifies how much of our real history in Vietnam, as elsewhere, was deliberately kept from public view.

Before I saw JFK, as my friends will condescendingly attest, I believed just as Kevin Costner did in Bull Durham when he tells Susan Sarandon, in a litany of his character traits, "I believe in the Warren Commission report that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone." And like Costner in real life, I was forced to reexamine the evidence Stone accumulated---and had to conclude that the official version is bunk. If the movie has the same effect on other people and we all start questioning what we have been told, that ought to be worth a couple of Academy Awards.