“I never realized Kennedy was so dangerous to the establishment. Is that why?”
- Jim Garrison District Attorney of Orleans Parish Louisiana
“Well that’s the real question, isn’t it?”
“Why?”
- Mr. X
I recently re-watched Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK and the movie still stands as an epic testament to not only the conspiracy that still lives almost 60 years on, but also to the amazing performances in the film.
I was struck by the sheer number of big names who were in the film that some such as Kevin Bacon and Vincent D'Onofrio before they were very well known. But what I forgot is that there were somewhat minor parts played by John Candy, Kevin Bacon, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon and yes, even Walter Matthau (but this wasn’t an Odd Couple reunion as Lemmon and Matthau do not appear together in the film).
While most who have seen the film remember that Tommy Lee Jones and Joe Pesci had major roles, it’s easy to forget that all those other guys were also in it given their statuses.
Side note: Even Jim Garrison himself had a role in the film ironically portraying Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren for whom the infamous Warren Report is named for.
But, in my opinion, the most amazing cameo (if you want to call it that) is by Donald Sutherland playing a spook cryptically named Mr. X.
The infamous Mr. X is described in Reel American History as:
“…loosely based on Col. L. Fletcher Prouty USAF (Ret.) who served as Chief of Special Operations with the Joint Chief of Staff during the Kennedy years. While the authors met with Prouty, Jim Garrison did not meet him until several years after the Clay Shaw trial. (Stone and Sklar)
Col. Fletcher Prouty was an intricate part of the government while serving but had nowhere near the knowledge that “X” appeared to be equipped with in the film. Most of what was said was pure speculation, and some of the information in the scene could go far enough to be completely false. Prouty did have his theories. His book The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John. F Kennedy goes into great detail about the conspiracy, but theories are as far as it can go.”
In the scenes in the clips below, Sutherland gives such a cracking performance delivering complex dialogue with such clarity, conviction, and realism, that it’s probably the most riveting scene in the movie.
And yes, this movie has tons of them, but these really stand out with me:
Here is the dialogue from the scene which when read after watching the above clip, is astounding:
X: Anyway, after I came back I asked myself why was I, the chief of special ops, selected to travel to the South Pole at that time to do a job that any number of others could have done? And I wondered if it could have been because one of my routine duties if I had been in Washington would've been to arrange for additional security in Texas so I decided to check it out.
Sure enough I found out that someone had told the 112th Military Intelligence Group at 4th Army Headquarters at Fort Sam Houston to "stand down" that day, over the protests of the unit Commander, a Colonel Reich.
(Cut away to Col. Reich)
Col. Reich: I believe it’s a mistake
X: Now this is significant, because it is standard operating procedure, especially in a known hostile city like Dallas, to supplement the Secret Service. I mean even if we had not allowed the bubbletop to be removed from the limousine, we'd've placed at least 100 to 200 agents on the sidewalks, without question!
I mean only a month before in Dallas UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been spit on and hit. There'd already been several attempts on de Gaulle's life in France.
We would have arrived days ahead of time, studied the route, checked all the buildings. Never would've allowed all those wide-open empty windows overlooking Dealey. Never !
We would have had our own snipers covering the area. The minute a window went up they'd have been on the radio. We would've been watching the crowds - packages, rolled up newspapers, a coat over an arm, we never would have let a man open an umbrella along the way. Never would've allowed that limousine to slow down to 10 miles per hour, much less take that unusual curve at Houston and Elm.
You would have felt an Army presence in the streets that day. But none of this happened. It was a violation of the most basic protection codes we have. And it is the best indication of a massive plot in Dallas.
Now who could have best done this? Black ops, Mr. Garrison people in my business.
People like my superior officer could've told Col. Reich, "Look - we have another unit coming from so and so providing security. You'll stand down." I mean that day, in fact, there were some individual Army Intelligence people in Dallas and I'm still trying to figure out who and why. But they weren't protecting the client.
And of course Oswald. The Army had a “Harvey Lee Oswald” on file. But all those files have been destroyed.
Very strange things were happening and your Lee Harvey Oswald had nothing to do with them.
We had the entire Cabinet on a trip to the Far East, we had one third of a combat division returning from Germany in the air above the United States at the time of the shooting,
At 12:34 pm the entire telephone system when out in Washington for a solid hour. And on the plane back to Washington, word was radioed from the Whitehouse situations room to Lyndon Johnson that one individual performed the assassination.
That sound like a bunch of coincidences to you Mr. Garrison?
Garrison: No.
X: Not for one moment. The Cabinet was out of the country to get the perceptions out of the way. Troops were in the air for possible riot control. The telephones didn’t work to keep the wrong story from spreading in case anything went wrong with the plan.
Nothing was left to chance. He could not be allowed to escape alive.
Well I never thought things were the same after that. Viet Nam started for real, there was an air of, I don’t know, make believe in the Pentagon and the CIA. Those of us who had been in secret ops since the beginning knew the Warren Commission was fiction.
But there was something, something deeper. Uglier.
I know Alan Dulles very well. I briefed him many a time at his house. But for the life of me, I still can’t figure out why he was appointed to investigate Kennedy’s death, the man who had fired him.
Dulles, by the way was General Y’s benefactor. I got out in ‘64. Resigned my commission.
Garrison: "I never realized Kennedy was so dangerous to the Establishment. Is that why?
X: Well, that's the real question, isn't it? Why?
The 'How' and the 'Who' is just scenery for the public. Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the Mafia, keeps 'em guessing like some kind of parlor game.
Prevents 'em from asking the most important question: Why?
Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited? Who has the power to cover it up? Who?...
And for this one above:
X: And don't underestimate the budget cuts that Kennedy called for in March of '63 either. Nearly 52 military installations in 25 states, 21 overseas bases. You're talking big money. You know how many helicopters have been lost in Vietnam? Hm?
About three thousand so far. Who makes them?
Bell Helicopter. Who owns Bell? Well Bell was near bankruptcy when the First National Bank of Boston approached the CIA about developing the helicopter for Indochina usage.
How 'bout the F-111 fighters? General Dynamics in Fort Worth Texas. Who owns that? Find out the defense budget since the war began. $75 going on a hundred billion, maybe $200 billion'll be spent before it’s over. In 1949 it was $10 billion.
No war, no money.
The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war.
The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. And Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War in his second term. He wanted to call off the moon race in favor of cooperation with the Soviets. He signed a treaty with the Soviets to ban nuclear testing. He refused to invade Cuba in 1962 and he set out to withdraw from Vietnam.
But all of that ended on the 22nd of November, 1963.
As early as 1961, they knew Kennedy was not going to war in Southeast Asia. Like Caesar, he is surrounded by enemies and something's underway, but it has no face. Yet everybody in the loop knows...
(Cutaway to military officers discussing war funding)
General: You can forget about your combat troops. He told McNamara, he is going to pull out off of the goddamned advisors! He fucked us in Laos and now he is going to fuck us in goddamn Viet Nam!
Man 1: He won’t implement it before the election, he can’t afford to.
Man 2: I hear that the NSD meeting was a real barn burner.
Man 3: I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Heads are gonna roll everywhere. Did you hear what Lemnitzer did?
Offscreen man: What happened?
Man 3: Kennedy tried to rub Lem’s nose in shit saying that if we didn’t go into Cuba which is so close, why should we go into Viet Nam which is so far away?
Man 2: Son of a bitch, there he goes again, he’s got his hands on the chicken switch.
Man 3: Anyway, Lem said that the chiefs still think we oughta go into Cuba.
All laugh.
X: It’s money. Big money. 100 billion dollars.
Kennedy bought his target voting districts for those defense dollars. They give TFX fighter contracts only to those counties that are gonna to make a difference in’64 and the people loop, they fight back. Their way.
(Cutaway to military officers discussing war funding)
Man 1: We have to control the intelligence from Saigon
LBJ: So just don’t let McNamara start stickin’ his damn nose in this thing. Every time he goes over to Saigon on some fuckin’ fact finding mission. He comes back and he just scares the shit outta the President!
Now I want Max Taylor on him every night and day. Like a fly on shit.
Now you control McNamara, you control Kennedy.
X: I think it started like that. In the wind.
Defense contractors, big oil, bankers. Just conversations, nothing more then, a call was made. Made to someone like my superior officer, General Y.
(Cutaway to General Y on the phone)
Gen. Y: Yeah.
Voice on the phone: We’re going. We need your help.
Gen. Y: When?
Voice on the phone: In the fall. Probably with sounds. We want you to come up with a plan.
Gen. Y: I can do that.
X: Everything is cellularized. No one has said, 'He must die.' There's been no vote. Nothing's on paper. There's no one to blame. It's as old as the crucifixion.
A military firing squad: five bullets, one blank. No one's guilty, because everyone in the power structure who knows anything has a plausible deniability. There are no compromising connections except at the most secret point.
But what's paramount is that it must succeed. No matter how many die, no matter how much it costs, the perpetrators must be on the winning side and never subject to prosecution for anything by anyone.
That is a coup d'état....
More dialogue below not in either of those clips (for some reason I couldn’t find this part or a clip of the whole scene).
Update: Here’s a clip of the last part of this fantastic scene:
X: Kennedy announces the Texas trip in September. At that moment, second Oswalds start popping up all over Dallas where they had the mayor and the cops in their pocket.
General Y flies in the assassins.
A special camp we keep outside Athens, Greece. Pros. Maybe locals, Cubans, Mafia hire, separate teams. Does it really matter who shot from what rooftop?
Part of the scenery right?
I keep thinkin’ about that day. Tuesday, the 26th of November. The day after they buried Kennedy.
(Cutaway to a room with LBJ and others)
LBJ: Gentlemen, I want you to know that I’m not gonna let Viet Nam go like China did. I’m personally committed. And I’m not gonna take one soldier outta there til they know we mean business in Asia.
X: Lyndon Johnson signs National Security Memo 273 which essentially reverses Kennedy’s new withdrawal policy and gives a green light to covert action against North Viet Nam which provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
LBJ: Just keep me elected. I’ll give you your damn war.
X: In that document, lay the Viet Nam war.
Garrison: "I don't, I can't - I can't believe they killed him because he wanted to change things. In our time. In our country."
X:Well, they've been doing it all through history. Kings are killed, Mr. Garrison. Politics is power, nothing more! Oh, don't take my word for it, don't believe me. Do your own work, your own thinkin'....
Garrison: The size of this is beyond me. Testify?
Testify.
X: Me? No chance in hell. No, I'd be arrested and gagged, maybe sent to an institution, maybe worse, you too. I can give you the background, but you have to find the foreground, the little things. Keep digging. Remember, you're the only person to bring a trial in the murder of John Kennedy. That's important, it's historic...
Garrison: I haven't yet. I don't have much of a case.
X: You don't have a choice anymore. You've become a significant threat to the national security structure. They would have killed you already but you got a lot of light on you. Instead, they're trying to destroy your credibility. They already have in many circles in this town. Be honest. Your only chance is to come up with a case. Something. Anything. Make arrests. Stir the shit storm. Hope to reach a point of critical mass that'll start a chain reaction of people coming forward. Then the government'll crack.
Remember, fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth, and the truth is on your side, bubba.
I just hope you get a break.
It’s very likely that all of this dialogue is a composite of what Oliver Stone wanted to convey using a single character who wasn’t actually the one who gave all this inside information to Jim Garrison in one secret meeting.
What an absolutely phenomenal performance by Donald Sutherland there.
I do want to touch briefly on Oliver Stone here as well. In an interview with Patrick Bet-David on March 11, 2022 Stone said this in answer to a question from Adam Sosnick:
Adam Sosnick: Can I revisit one thing you just said a second ago? I don’t want to gloss over it cause I mean listening to you being educated beyond, but you said you voted for Biden.
Stone: Yeah I did.
Sosnick: I assume you didn’t do that lightly.
Stone: Well I didn’t have a choice.
Sosnick: Ok well that’s what I wanted to ask you is that why do you feel your back was against the wall like as if you didn’t have a choice to put it in Putin’s terms? And then what’d you expect from him and where do, what grade would you I guess give him now?
Stone: I, you know I’m a sucker for believe... I’m an optimist and I believe that he reached a certain age. Uh he’s 78? And he’s a little more mature and that he sees a bigger picture. And in this case, Ukraine, he is cre.. he is making a big mistake. A big mistake! He’s off, he thinks he’s off the hook, he looks like the good guy now with all this anti Russian thing, but when we get to a deeper place, which is where it’s gonna go, and this thing gets harder and harder for Americans, and they might be, we’re not past any war yet. The war could expand. Now certainly Zelenskyy would like the war to expand cause he would sacrifice the world in order to uh save Ukraine. He doesn’t care about us. Doesn’t care about, he sees this whole thing as a crusade, as a jihad. Uh Biden has given him the go ahead to do this. Biden’s the one who should be calming this situation down he should be speaking to Putin, speaking to Zelenskyy, calming it down being a statesman instead of being an ideologue. This is a time for ah, for ah a Kennedy this is a time, that’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. This is a time for statesmen, a statesman like you know, a Charles De Gaulle somebody who has a picture of the world. I was hoping Macron of France would have some effect, but you can’t get through the Ukraine - US connection. That’s the problem.
Sosnick: But beyond Ukraine, I mean what’s happening…
Stone: There’s no beyond Ukraine right now because you get stuck there. There’s a disconnect. The Americans see Russia as uh evil, and they don’t understand and there’s the Russian position, which is crazy. Why can’t a statesman understand what Russia is thinking? Putin is fighting for his life. You can get rid of him but whoever takes his place will probably be tougher because they know that they’re up against it. OK let him give up let’s say “OK give up” then what do you do if you want to give up? Alright, then put your, put NATO into Ukraine, put put missiles into Ukraine, fine. You can put ‘em right on our border, we’ll take all the refugees, you can give us and ah there’ll be another confrontation when you make your next move.
Sosnick: And one of the things you also hear is that this would all be different under Trump. Nothing happened with Ukraine and Russia under Trump.
Stone: That’s not true. That’s not true at all. Trump on the contrary is a very strange guy. He was making sounds about Putin and when he was came in and I was hoping that there’d be some détente. But as, as he got more and more pressure for his ah Russiagate which was a joke, but it was a serious, serious accusation. That was of course political too. Putting pressure on Trump, not allowing him to get anything done with this pressure with this Russiagate, for what two years? That was insane. That he was a Russian agent, all that stuff. No one, I mean if you were thinking it’s it was so ridiculous. And I asked Putin about that too and Putin practically laughed. It was, he knows that it’s not possible. But they pictured Trump as a tool, as a Manchurian candidate or something. As a result, he became very anti-Russian too in the sense that he was past every single sanction against Russia that was asked, put on to him by Congress. Check his record on Russia. He did everything they wanted. And then recently I saw yesterday or two days ago one of his comments which was insane he said he would, he would he’s not a coward like Biden. Something like Biden is a weakling something like that. Implying that he would be much tougher which means what, war? Nuclear war to my mind.
I’m sorry Mr. Stone but that was as circular logic in an answer that I’ve heard in a while. (Keep in mind, I don’t listen to anything Psaki or anyone that’s supposedly in the so-called ‘administration’ says).
The facts are, and Oliver Stone knows this as he’s covered what’s been going on in Ukraine extensively for almost a decade now, (and maybe even longer) that Vladimir Putin has absolutely been warning NATO, the West, and Ukraine about encroaching Russia’s borders. Stone has interviewed Putin directly about this as well.
So for him to say that Trump capitulated to Congress about Russia and never sanctioned them is ridiculous. It’s like a he said/she said where Stone is saying Congress forced Trump’s hand and Trump is saying he was tough on Russia:
From The Carnegie Moscow Center written by Fyodor Lukyanov Nov. 11, 2020:
The most prominent and functional instrument they did have was sanctions, hence the sharp rise in legislative activity in this area. The focus of that activity was Russia, since it was at the center of the Democrats’ conflict with Trump.
And so began a vicious circle, as the presidential administration and Congress vied to see who could be tougher on Russia. Trump delayed some of the strongest measures, but when pressured, either agreed to them or introduced his own, declaring that “there’s never been a president as tough on Russia as I have been.”
As a result, during Trump’s four years in power, a record forty-plus rounds of sanctions have been slapped on Russia. Many of them are enshrined in law, meaning they are here to stay. There is, however, hope that the frantic competing to pass new measures will finally subside as Congress stops trying to block the president at any cost.
So Stone is incorrect here and also can’t debunk the fact that the issue with Russia and Ukraine predate Donald Trump’s presidency and Russia did not act on Ukraine while Trump was in office.
More to come…
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