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In recent testimony to the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, Oliver Stone called for a new investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Stone is the director of the 1991 JFK, quite possibly the worst source on the events of November 22, 1963. As the task force should know, the events Stone dramatized began four years later.
In 1967, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison charged businessman Clay Shaw with participating in a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. That caught the attention of William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, who assigned the story to Edward Jay Epstein, a writer highly qualified for the task.
Epstein authored Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Search for Truth, published in 1966. Commission members Earl Warren, Allen Dulles, Hale Boggs, John S. Cooper, Richard Russell, John McCloy and Gerald Ford, the author discovered, were essentially figureheads. The intrepid Epstein tracked down the government lawyers who had done the actual work. The Commission left many questions unanswered, so Epstein was doubtless eager to check out this new lead.
“The Warren Commission moved the same pieces back and forth and got nowhere,” Garrrison told Epstein. “I made a new move and solved the problem.” The DA claimed that the address books of Clay Shaw and Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald contained an identical entry, which Epstein found to be “untrue.” Garrison also claimed the number was a code, which he unraveled by arbitrarily rearranging the digits, subtracting another number, and adding the letters WH, so it yielded WH-1-5601, the telephone number of Jack Ruby, who gunned down Oswald two days after the JFK killing.
Garrison told Epstein he also transposed the third, fourth and last digit and subtracted the difference. As Epstein pondered this mystery, he got a call from Tom Bethell, who worked in Garrison’s office. As Bethell explained, an entry in Shaw’s address book, PO Box 19106 had been assigned to Lee Odom, the exact name listed in Shaw’s book. That number in Oswald’s book could not have referred to the same thing because Dallas post office records showed that the number did not exist before being assigned to Odom in 1965.
Garrison ordered staffers not to discuss this mistake, and after searching a dozen men named Clay, the DA decoded Clay Bertrand as Clay Shaw. Epstein knew what to make of it.
“In the year I have been studying Garrison’s investigation, and have had access to his office,” he wrote, “the only evidence I have seen that could connect Shaw with the assassination had been fraudulent – some devised by Garrison himself and some cynically culled from criminals or the emotionally unstable.” This fraudulent evidence was the back story of Stone’s JFK, which the director considered instructional. Stone’s didactic side also emerged in The Untold History of the United States, co-authored with Peter Kuznick and published in 2012.
The only American hero is former vice president Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate for president of the United States in 1948. Wallace is portrayed as an American Gorbachev, the only hope to save the United States which, by setting off atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “once again, proved itself unready to provide the kind of leadership a desperate world cried out for.”
The authors tout Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man,” but fail to note that Wallace confused the common man with the Comintern. That organization does not appear in the book, which contains material about the USSR, Stalin, Communism and such. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was the “unsavory deal,” Stalin struck with Hitler because he feared a “German-Polish alliance” to attack the USSR.
During the Pact, Stalin delivered German Jews to the Nazis. As Margarete Buber-Neumann explained in Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler, SS and GPU officers saluted each other and read out the names of those to be handed over. That episode seems to have escaped the JFK director.
Untold History lists only two atrocities for Stalin, the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest and “having the Red Army stop on the banks of the Vistula while the Germans put down the Warsaw uprising.” Nothing about the genocide noted in the Black Book of Communism and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. The authors include a photo of Russians mourning Stalin, who at the time of his death in 1953 was about to unleash terror on Soviet Jews, slandered as “rootless cosmopolitans.”
After World War II, the USSR “had no blueprint for postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe and hoped to maintain friendly and collaborative relations with its wartime allies.” Further, the Soviets “had gone out of their way to guarantee West Berliners’ access to food and coal from the eastern zone or from direct Soviet provisions.” So the heroic Berlin airlift touted in American schools was all for nothing.
And so on, confirming that Oliver Stone is also the worst source on his own country, an evil, oppressive place except for Stone’s movie deals, bank accounts, luxury homes and so forth. Edward Epstein would have made a better witness but he died last year. Fortunately, he left the keys by the back door in his last book, Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-be Masters of the Universe.
The “Jolly Green Giant” chapter charts Jim Garrison and “The Great JFK Debate” lays out the issues. The chapter on “James Jesus Angleton” recalls the CIA counterintelligence chief, the key character in Epstein’s Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and CIA. Readers of Inquest will find a fascinating sequel in Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald.
As the files now being declassified show, Angleton believed Oswald was a Soviet agent. New revelations will doubtless emerge, but it will always be about memory against forgetting.
