JFK

0:00:03.7 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Landry Ayres. Today, instead of going through the looking glass, we are smashing it. Oliver Stone’s 1991, paranoid thriller JFK is a stylish flashy entertaining film, but what about its substance? Here to separate fact, fiction and fallacy are two returning guests to the show, books editor at Reason Jesse Walker.

0:00:29.2 Jesse Walker: Howdy?

0:00:31.1 Landry Ayres: And research fellow at the Cato Institute and our old friend, Paul Matzko.

0:00:35.3 Paul Matzko: I’m so old. I’m ancient, man. [laughter]

0:00:38.9 Landry Ayres: Where to begin with this movie, is it the three hour long run time that I forced these two to sit through? Is it the impeccable accent work of Joe Pesci and John Candy? Is it the sort of undercurrent of homophobia that runs throughout a lot of it that may or may not be reflective of what it actually is covering. I think what we wanna start with though is what Stone is trying to do with this movie? So he has stated that one of his primary goals with JFK was to provide a rebuttal to the Warren commissions, sort of what he calls a fictional myth, the kind of story that they concoct and state like these are the events that we believe played out and how they occurred and he wanted to kind of counteract that and provide something else and lays out a pretty didactic case in this film, pretty straightforwardly. Now, what is he trying to do in contrast to what was commonly assumed to be the truth at the time of this film’s release?

0:01:55.2 Paul Matzko: Well, I suppose he missed very little is the… [laughter] the first reaction. Everything’s in there. It’s he threw the kitchen sink at the question of the JFK assassination. So it is a hodgepodge of a bunch of different theories, not all of which what you would think would contradict each other. So it’s not just one sinister actor, we have all the sinister actors involved, there’s references to the mob, the CIA, to Johnson to… Just go down the list. And he’s a bit agnostic when it comes to which conspiracy theory is responsible, and so he just goes with, “Well, all of them. There’s one giant conspiracy responsible for killing Kennedy.” Which is the polar opposite of the Warren commission approach which he is criticizing, which is that it’s simple, it’s straightforward that there’s a single shooter, three shots from one location, it’s straightforward, there’s no big conspiracy, it’s a lone Wolf. And so he takes exactly the opposite approach in the film.

0:03:00.9 Jesse Walker: Yeah, it’s a… I think he does have a theory that he likes in particular. Not everything in the movie adds up to it. And I think there’s actually a little bit of tension between the author and the work here. I think he believes… They keep saying it’s a Coup d’état, that he thinks the national security state killed Kennedy. He uses details more as a narrative device and as something that’s supposed to add up. But at some point I think one might notice during Kevin Costner’s summation speech, that he’s no longer even arguing about Clay Shaw there, he’s just making a case about… He’s stopped talking about the guy he has on trial and is just trying to criticize the Warren commission report. And they actually do have a juror being interviewed afterwards, you catch like a snippet of it as the camera goes by saying, well, I think… I’m not sure that there… I think there may have been a conspiracy, but I don’t think, he didn’t prove that this guy was part of it. That’s not the direct quote, but that was the gist of it.

0:04:01.3 Jesse Walker: So, but at the same time that he has this idea, which we can talk about a bit more later. He really does cover a lot more. They even have that moment where the FBI pulls one of Garrison’s sort of leg men aside and says “Well, we know it was Castro who did this, but we don’t want people calling for war. We’ve gotta keep that from coming out.” Now that completely contradicts Stone’s idea, but he leaves it ambiguous as to whether he thinks this was a cover story, or whether this is what the FBI actually believed, and this explained their participation in the cover-​up, if it’s a mix. So what you end up having is and then you just add the whole style of these almost psychedelic montages in the film. You have these cascading images and ideas that sort of in practice sweep aside any single story about what happened in Dallas and whether or not Stone means for this to be the case, the film starts looking less like a historical thesis and more of a panoramic view of the psychedelic landscape of post assassination paranoid America.

0:05:12.4 Jesse Walker: And one sort of odd thing about this movie, I last saw it before this I re-​watched it for this podcast in the theater when it came out. And I remembered it being much more… Those montages stayed in my mind, much of the actual drama did not and I had forgotten how much of this was kind of a straightforward conventional and kind of tedious message movie with these cliche scenes between Jim Garrison and his wife and it’s try to… Pulling him away from his family and so on. And it really kind of struck me that so many movies they slow to a crawl during the exposition and they come alive during the action, this one slows to a crawl during an action, but it comes alive during these info dumps. [laughter] That’s where the art of the movie is. And it was really kind of odd to revisit it and realize that this… Especially since Stone went on to make Nixon and Natural Born Killers, which were even more psychedelic and he went further and further in this direction for a while. And I forgot how much of his sort of earlier style was still embedded in this movie.

0:06:20.5 Paul Matzko: Yeah. We kinda have two movies combined into one. Part of that’s, it was written by two different folks. Stone focused his writing efforts on daily Plaza, on Kennedy, straight… More straightforwardly, the actual assassination and I think the national security apparatus sections, the shadowy smoke filled room scenes. Whereas Zachary Sklar wrote the… He took… He basically adapted Jim Garrison’s autobiography. So the tedious drama, the poor sissies basic having to keep up with Kevin Costner in a thin role that was written for her, bless her heart, like that stuff come… So you have kind of two different movies. You have Jim Garrison’s laudatory, autobiography of himself that gets adapted for the part of the movie, and then you have what Stone cares about, which is the assassination and the national security apparatus, and they don’t necessarily hold together real well, which is I think why… What do you think, Jesse?

0:07:22.3 Jesse Walker: It’s also based on two books. There’s the garrison memoir, and there’s also a Jim Marrs book, which I used to have. Jim Marrs went on to make… Write books about UFOs, and so forth. He is not one of the more respectable conspiracy researcher types. But this was his first I think… I don’t know if his first book but his sort of first major book. It got a real boost from the movie, but even before that, I remember my then girlfriend for my birthday giving me this sort of conspiracy pack of that and silent who and the keys of this blood. And this is the one…

0:07:54.9 Paul Matzko: That’s true love.

0:07:55.9 Jesse Walker: Yeah, I still… Well, she knew even then I was interested in tracking this stuff. So I used to have this book. And I remember it being a mixture. It was… I think it was formatted as an encyclopedia, but it’s certainly… I don’t have it in front of me, but it certainly felt like one. And it was this mixture of like, areas where there are real, actual open questions about what happened and stuff that he just found in where, Rusi publication [laughter] just sort of all thrown in, and so there’s no difference between these narratives.

0:08:27.2 Landry Ayres: It sounds more like the movie.

0:08:28.9 Jesse Walker: Yeah, exactly. And that’s where I’m getting at, is like this feels like the seed of the sort of psychedelic side of the movie, which again I happened to like. I didn’t like it as much as the first time I saw it, but I do think it’s a skillfully made and enjoyable movie and it is because of that psychic, the montages, the weird parts, not Kevin Costner being Gary Cooper light and trying to represent truth justice in the American way.

0:09:01.9 Landry Ayres: There’s a reason that this film, I believe, won the Oscar for best editing of all the things like as a composition and its component parts, there’s a lot of really, really great technical things going on and artistically, it certainly is visionary in a certain way, and it has a coherent, artistic sort of oeuvre about it, even if the message gets a little bit muddled at times, or at least is justified on grounds that are tenuous to be charitable.

0:09:37.9 Jesse Walker: I should say this came out the same year as a… And rain me, I start talking about other movies. [laughter] But this came out the same year as Greg Baldwin’s Tribulation 99, which is the real conspiracy masterpiece of 1991 [laughter] which was a real conspiracy because also David Mamet’s Homicide and Slacker. There was a whole bunch of sort of conspiracy-​oriented films that year, or partly conspiracy oriented in the case of Slacker. But Tribulation 99 is also done in this sort of wild editing montage ways. But all the material or almost all the material that we see comes from Old b movies and things like that. And there’s this narrator, who spins this deliberately absurd conspiracy theory involving aliens and so forth, which is sort of offered to justify all the crimes of the Cold War in the national security state, there’s like… Basically, the upshot is, and you have to understand they were sacrificing these people so that we would not be destroyed. [laughter]

0:10:37.5 Jesse Walker: And then periodically, they would also have appearing on the screen, texts telling us about the actual facts of what had happened in Guatemala or what have you. So it’s just multi… And there’s actually a little bit of the Kennedy assassination in there too. The narrator ends up saying that he made those shots so quickly because he was an Android, things like that. [laughter] So it’s very… I mean, it’s much more… It’s both wilder and ultimately more coherent, more controlled in sort of like getting across a thesis and channeling these montages and all these sort of multiple layers towards an argument than Stones movie is, but it was a 45 minute low budget cult video so it did not get as much attention as Oliver Stones cast of thousands Oscar bait.

0:11:31.5 Paul Matzko: It does have that like a forward motion. So the content, the argument is reasonable, but the filmmaking part of it is very well done. It has that, if you watch is it… Searchlight about the cover up…

0:11:49.0 Landry Ayres: Spotlight.

0:11:49.6 Paul Matzko: Journalist… Spotlight. Spotlight the Catholic Church cover up and the journalists. Well, it is also an exposition dump, but has that same sense of forward momentum, and every line has a bunch of meaning behind it. And so every… Now in this case, a lot of those little factoids that get dropped in constantly don’t actually mean anything if you look at them up close, if you take the time, which who has the time, other than these semi quasi professional conspiracy researchers to look at every single one of the thousands of factoids dropped, but if you look at up close it doesn’t make a ton of sense. But just… You just let it wash over you, The fact that Oswald only had $200 in his checking account, and that’s less than the ticket cost to Moscow. It just gets dropped in, and every line like that has an ocean of meaning, or implication, I should say behind it. And so the way they approach is just to let it wash over you. I think Jesse’s psychedelic approach makes a lot of sense, and to take it… I don’t know, I suppose seriously but not literally, it’s not a movie meant to be taken literally, maybe Stones made it that way but that’s not the way… That’s not the best way to watch it.

0:13:02.5 Jesse Walker: There are also images that sort of serve as Easter eggs like they never talk about the umbrella man and that alleged mystery but that you have at least two occasions showing the person raising his umbrella and that’s thrown in. They do… They show the person the alleged alteration of the photo of Oswald with his rifle, you see them making that long before you have the callback to it and if you’re not familiar with the claims that this was a… Not photoshopped because data Photoshop didn’t exist at the end of the ’60s, analog by hand with scissors version of Photoshop, that it was… Then you might not even remember having seen those, but if you’ve been kind of… If you’re familiar at all with the literature, you probably were picking up on that before, and if you’re not familiar with it, it’s just still filmed in a way that seems suspicious and you’re watching it, and it all feels like you’re being flooded with stuff that’s important in some way.

0:14:00.1 Paul Matzko: There’s this way in which it is a movie made for a fandom that will seem familiar to those of us who… We’re kind of Marvel movie fandoms, where every… There’s little Easter eggs and droplets and tidbits that aren’t necessary for the viewer, but if you are one of the fans, one of the true believers it’s just like, “Oh, in the background, I see that suit which corresponds with this super hero villain or comic book hero.” That’s what this is. So in a sense, JFK is taking advantage of this immense conspiracy… JFK conspiracy fandom that had developed in the… Really in the ’70s is when it takes off for reasons we can talk about. But yeah, think of it like the Marvel movie, yeah.

0:14:43.4 Landry Ayres: And that’s actually what I wanna ask about, Paul, is why… Why is the JFK assassination conspiracy itself like such a big deal? When I was in high school, we would be in history class and we had like a week to cover everything from 1945 through post 9/11 America. So I don’t think I ever really understood the significance of his assassination as a sort of cultural touch stone other than something that was picked apart and the fact that he was president, and it’s a big deal when presidents are killed. So what was going on in the culture at the time, and I guess in the years after that, in the ’70s when these really came to prominence that made this the mother of all conspiracy theories?

0:15:35.6 Paul Matzko: When I used to teach America in the 1960s, we would dedicate two lectures to the assassination and then to the conspiracy theories, to talk about what it tells us about American society in the ’60s. So you should’ve taken my class Landry, that’s clearly the answer here. But though we are as far away… We are farther away from when this movie was released, than the movie was from the assassination of JFK, so it’s been a long time, something like a fewer than a quarter of Americans were born before 1963, and let alone old enough to actually remember it live, so there’s a lot of distance between then and now. So yeah, I’m not sure it… It is distant. When I would talk to my students about the 1960s, I might as well have been talking about the 1860s for how current it felt to them, it just was too distant for a lot of college students age folks today.

0:16:29.1 Paul Matzko: But as far as where the political milieu out of which you get ramping conspiracy theorizing about the Kennedy assassination, and I think it’s important to remember, up until the 1960s, really up until the late ’60s, ’70s, the CIA, the Foreign Intelligence and domestic surveillance apparatus, the CIA, FBI, was doing all kinds of shady things, so Oliver Stone is critiquing something that was real, which was that the CIA would routinely topple governments in places like Iran and in Latin America, they were up to all kinds of skulduggery in Cuba, attempts to assassinate… Like Operation Mongoose is mentioned in the film, that was real, they did try to assassinate Fidel Castro via poisoned cigars and things like that. Bay of Pigs obviously was real and a big embarrassment to the Kennedy administration.

0:17:28.8 Paul Matzko: So the CIA did stuff that was just as fantastical as the things portrayed in the movie, which doesn’t tell you that they did the things in the movie, but it made it all believable, especially as what was once considered ordinary supporting the CIA’s endeavors was once one’s bound patriotic duty as a good red-​blooded American in the ’50s and into the ’60s, that doubts about that kind of trust in the American institutions has crept in increasingly by the late 1960s and 1970s, so when the Pentagon Papers are released showing that the US government had massively and routinely lied about the conduct and progress of the Vietnam War, when that gets leaked to the American people, as just a series of scandals that come out in the ’70s about CIA skulduggery and again, lying to Congress, lying to the American people.

0:18:22.0 Paul Matzko: People start saying, “Well, if we know they lied about this, what else might they be lying about?” Which is why if you look at public support for conspiracies about the JFK assassination, doubting the Warren Commission, it spikes in the ’70s. So immediately after there are people who think, “Well, maybe it’s more complicated than this, there’s stuff that’s not explained.” Jim Garrison, our crusading DA, he spiked some doubt in the late 60s, in ’67, ’68, ’69, but popular support for the idea that Kennedy was assassinated by sinister shadowy groups really takes off in the ’70s as people find out about sinister shadowy government authorized groups doing stuff. So in a lot of ways, the conspiracy theorizing about JFK is the cultural backlash to people finding out that the US government lies and does shady things with its foreign policy and domestic surveillance apparatus. So that’s the milieu.

0:19:29.9 Jesse Walker: Can I put some numbers to the public opinion, ’cause this is kinda interesting. Two weeks after the shooting, there’s a Gallup poll saying that 52% of Americans thought there was a conspiracy. That doesn’t mean a CIA conspiracy, it means that they thought that more people than Oswald were involved. In the 1964, the month after the Warren commission report comes out, you’ve got alright, a majority of people saying that they think, “Alright, he acted alone.” But that is the last time you ever see a plurality believing that. Even a plurality, let alone a majority believing that he acted alone. It starts to change in the late ’60s. And again, this includes people who think it’s a communist conspiracy, other ideas that are not the backlash ideas that Paul’s talking about. And then it really starts to take off in the ’70s. And actually the highest number that I’ve seen, was an ABC poll in 1983, where 80% of the public believed that it had been a conspiracy.

0:20:31.6 Jesse Walker: Again, not all agreeing on the same conspiracy, but at least thinking, “We don’t buy the official story, the Warren commission story.” And there are also, I don’t have these numbers in front of me, but although conspiracy belief in general is pretty constantly high in American society and actually the Sensky parent study, that looks at… That just sort of looked for how many conspiratorial letters to the editor, the New York times, ran had a huge spike in the 1950s, even bigger than in the Watergate ’70s because of, mostly because of cold war fears. But there is a real change in the public attitude towards the CIA and the FBI in the mid ’70s, they just plunge and that’s a direct result of things like the church committee, Watergate, Pentagon papers, the expose of COINTELPRO, which actually predates Watergate by a bit. And that really does… And there’s also the ’70s, this influences popular culture. I wanna talk a little bit about the precursors to this movie, because there’s a whole wave of ’70s conspiracy thrillers in the 1970s.

0:21:42.3 Jesse Walker: And when I say conspiracy thrillers, I just don’t, I don’t just mean like all sorts of spy movies and horror movies have conspiracies. Rosemary’s Baby is a conspiracy movie. [laughter] I mean, ones where you have either the intelligence agencies, or some secret force behind the intelligence agencies, or some secret force that clearly resembles the intelligence agencies conspiring against the public. And there’s a wave of these movies in the ’70s. And although you’ve had some earlier films that address the Kennedy assassination in some ways, you could… I don’t think you… I think you’d need multiple hands to count all the Brian De Palma movies that in some way allude to it. Yeah. And there’s even… In 1969, there was a spaghetti Western about the assassination of James Garfield where… The real Garfield was shot in DC, but they moved this to Dallas [laughter], which they, even though it was a bustling city, then they turned into a sort of standard Western town with the one street. But they have the president and a coach coming around the corner looking just like Kennedy in the limousine with, you know. And they have the wanted for treason posters.

0:22:57.6 Jesse Walker: It’s clearly they’re doing… They’re just like, “How can we do JFK as a Western?” Unfortunately it’s not a good movie, but it’s weird enough to be watchable. But in the ’70s, there’s these wave of films and there’s three in particular that are important precursors to JFK. One is Executive Action, which comes out in 1973, Dalton Trumbo wrote it. But it was based on a story by two well known JFK conspiracy theorists, Mark Lane, and Donald Freed. This one is, of the three movies, this is the one that’s actually a tedious bore. It’s not good, but it’s the one that’s also overtly… It is, this is the powerful people getting together and plotting the assassination of John F. Kennedy explicitly called Kennedy. Explicitly called John F. Kennedy in the movie. It’s sort of weird in that it’s both the super cynical, like there’s even a moment where they say that the secret purpose of the Vietnam war is to bring down the third world population, just sort of casually drops that.

[laughter]

0:24:01.1 Jesse Walker: But they also have a moment where one of the conspirators isn’t sure if they want to do it. And they say, “There ought to be a better way of settling things like this. Have you researched his private history?”, meaning Kennedy’s and the response is, “Oh, if we could find anything, we would’ve used that”. [laughter] On the one hand it’s super cynical, but also just impossibly innocent about Kennedy himself and also, and this happens with Stone too, how much Kennedy himself was implicated in all this, it’s cold war, is the [0:24:28.8] ____. But that was a direct precursor to JFK and also Donald Freed, wrote a much better movie. Robert Altman’s Secret Honor, his Nixon conspiracy movie, which was sort of a precursor to Oliver Stone’s Nixon. So I think of Freed is kind of this ghost that Oliver Stone follows around.

0:24:47.6 Jesse Walker: The second one is the Parallax View, 1974, Alan Pakula thriller, very effectively done as one of the best brainwashing sequences outside of Clockwork Orange, ever put on screen. And it’s not specifically about Kennedy as it is about this idea of a whole string of assassinations being master minded, the whole Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther king, Robert Kennedy. In this case, a fictional politician is killed as part of that string and the mystery begins. And then the third one, came out in 1979. And in my view by far the best JFK conspiracy movie, Winter Kills based on a Richard Condon novel. It’s played as a dark comedy. As with JFK, they go through every conceivable purp. In this case the president is called Timothy Keegan or something like that.

0:25:43.4 Jesse Walker: They’re freed from trying to be connected to, and the actual… I won’t say, who they actually turn out… Who turns out to be behind it so as not to spoil it, but it is just an extremely dark joke. Both in… Well, I won’t say more but it is… And all these movies were controversial, both Executive Action and Winter Kills had enough trouble in getting theatrical bookings and things like that, that there were legends of them being, “suppressed” and so on. But they are all, and along with just a whole string of sort of ’70s conspiracy thrillers, these are precursors to JFK. But when JFK comes out, it comes out in 1991. It is accidentally a post cold war movie. This comes out less than a week before the USSR dissolves.

0:26:36.9 Jesse Walker: I think it’s like a five-​day period. And so when this comes out… When it’s made, this feels like, the summation, like Oliver Stone is doing his version of these 70… He’s clearly been formed by that moment. He’s clearly been formed by his experiences in Vietnam and just being lied to by a National Security State. But it scans as a left wing critique because during the Cold War, criticizing what we people now call the Deep State was seen mostly as a left wing thing to do. And you had libertarians who signed on to this. You had some far right populists who over the course of the ’80s, started to converge with the critique and actually, Mark Lane, one of the original Kennedy conspiracy theorists was in the ’80s serving as attorney for the far right liberty lobby in a JFK-​related lawsuit.

0:27:39.6 Jesse Walker: But nonetheless, despite these outliers, when it comes out, it’s seen as this left wing perspective. And there’s this big debate on the left with some people defending it and other peoples like Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Coburn critiquing it saying, “No, Kennedy was also part of this Cold war, a National Security State monster. Don’t let them give him a pass like this.” But this was sort of seen for the most part as an inter-​left debate, even if some of the critics said things like, “You sound like a bunch of birches here.” Nowadays, if this movie came out now, it would have a huge Trumpian fan base.

0:28:22.0 Landry Ayres: Oh, yes.

0:28:22.5 Jesse Walker: People saying, “This is… Here’s a story about the Deep State bringing down a leader who challenged them.” The valences of the arguments here have changed so much. And that’s true, not just because of the specific experiences of Donald Trump, and the people around him but also because the Cold War is the distant past now. We talked about this in our X-​Files episode. There was this tendency in the ’90s to revise the history of the Cold War to, even among people who had been conservatives, who had been more likely to support the National Security State, when the alternative was the Soviet Union, to reconsider whether these folks were on your side or not. And in some ways, this movie ends up being one of the early signposts towards that. And it’s interesting… Oliver Stone, if you look, he was not pro-​Trump at all. He endorsed… I think he voted for Jill Stein and then for Biden. But he’s very much… His take on the Russia stuff is that this was fake news. Which is…

0:29:37.0 Landry Ayres: He claims to have gotten the Sputnik vaccine for Covid-​19, if that tells you anything.

[chuckle]

0:29:45.1 Paul Matzko: Well, there is this way in which, I think the comparison’s apt. You can imagine coming to theaters near you in 2040, a movie starring Sydney Powell and the crusading… But I think it’s not, attorney general like Jim Garrison. But playing that Jim Garrison role, Sydney Powell’s going to release the Kraken. So he’s gonna get to the bottom of the truth and it’s all about… There’s this group of poorly substantiated allegations, little factoids like, “Did you see that video? This person took a longer than usual break. He came back with something in their pocket while in between counting ballots.” And, “Ooh, do you see this box under the table? Where did that box come from?” And they take all these factoids from disreputable sources, from political grifters and opportunists and weave it together into a grand story about the Coup d’etat. That real Coup d’etat is not January 6th, it’s Joe Biden keeping office despite losing the election. So, you can imagine that is what this would be 20 years from now.

0:30:49.2 Jesse Walker: So, Paul, my question for you is, since Jim Garrison had the cameo as Earl Warren in this movie, who would the real Sydney Powell have a cameo as in the movie that you’re imagining?

[laughter]

0:31:03.1 Paul Matzko: Yeah. Maybe as Kellyanne Conway’s character in the movie or something. Well, the… My favorite cameo in the film…

0:31:10.9 Jesse Walker: Mike Pence.

0:31:11.4 Paul Matzko: Mike Pence. [laughter] Yeah. I think it’s Perry Russo, is that his name? There is a bit player, one of that gallery of lowlifes who are part of this complicated conspiracy early on in the film. He actually… Later on, he alleges that Jim Garrison strong-​armed him. A bunch of people involved in the story later said that Garrison would ultimately offer them pardons or offer to bribe them or time-​off their sentences, or would threaten them with further punishment unless they said what he wanted them to say. One of those guys, who he then went back and forth on the question of what extent Garrison, strong-​armed him. But he gets a bit part in the film. He’s actually the guy in the bar early on who’s like, “I’m glad they killed that SOB.” That’s one of the actual people from the complicated New Orleans nightlife scene that Jim Garrison investigates. So the whole thing is just… Yeah.

0:32:14.1 Jesse Walker: And, I can say now that Garrison is apparently a better actor than Russo. I thought that was very, not a well delivered line, but as Earl Warren Garrison, was it? No. Yeah. Can I just say about the cast here? I’m not a big fan of Kevin Costner’s performance. I think he does fine.

0:32:31.1 Landry Ayres: I know, it’s so flat.

0:32:33.3 Jesse Walker: With the speech that’s oratory not acting, but yes, he delivers a good speech at the end. But it’s… They have so many good actors, and a few of them are wasted like Sissy Spacek. But John Candy just acts circles around Kevin Costner in there, and they’re staying together…

0:32:51.8 Landry Ayres: He’s doing 100% like Michael Kane in The Muppet movie which is my standard for going so hard in a role with…

[laughter]

0:32:57.2 Landry Ayres: You have no right going as hard as you do.

0:33:00.3 Jesse Walker: It just became like, “Why is he remembered as this clown from SC TV?” And Costner is the guy who keeps getting starring roles. And also, is this the only time that Jack lemon and Walter Matthau were in a movie, but did not get screen time together? They should have ridden something where Senator Russell Long meets this assistant to the private investigator, just so they could do a little bit of old shtick together. It would’ve fit somehow.

0:33:30.4 Paul Matzko: Yeah. Well, I mean, all the A-​listers in Hollywood wanted to be part of this film, the cast is stellar. I mean, Donald Sutherland, you go down the list.

0:33:37.1 Jesse Walker: Yeah.

0:33:37.1 Paul Matzko: And I mean, it is important. It is also a film that was viewed through the lens of the Iran Contra controversy, which is just a few years before. That’s in the headlines as they start producing this movie even just appears before the release. And you can see the notes being dropped. They talk a lot about money laundering. There’s talk about… They’re clearly thinking here about that exchange of selling drugs and arms shipments and that’s… So, as part of your point, Jesse, about this being a perceived as a left wing critique of the national security state in 1991, that’s very much in their minds. But as far as the acting, I think Tommy Lee Jones just giving his all, going overboard with his very loosh villain in this film, the poor fella. I mean, the guy in real life did not deserve Clay, Clay Shaw here didn’t deserve what he got. But, maybe this brings us up to the question of homophobia in the film. And you mentioned this Jesse, that…

0:34:38.4 Jesse Walker: Even more so in the Garrison investigation itself. I don’t wanna say subtle is the word for it in the Stone film, but you can at least make the case, that the… He would say, “Well, a lot of these characters were gay. It just happens to be that way.” And then you still have things like, “Well, but you have the scene with the guy dressed as orgy [0:35:02.4] ____.

[laughter]

0:35:02.5 Landry Ayres: Doing a bunch of like snuff and things like that. Oh my gosh.

0:35:06.3 Jesse Walker: But one thing that they… This is a true fact that Jim Garrison had been an anti vice Crusader as district attorney in New Orleans. There’s this recent book by Alecia Long, Cruising for Conspirators, which is all sort of about this, it’s… I recommend it. And who… Increased arrests for homosexuality related charges, but did not… A lot of those did not actually go to trial, which led to theories that there was a shakedown going on or searching for ways to get leverage over people, to use as informants to get… Or to get to the testimony he wanted to from them. And a lot of this fed into his investigation. And in fact, at one point early on, one of the first articles about it, his working theory was that it was quote, “The assassination had been a homosexual thrill killing.” And then he compared it to Leopold and Loeb. And hang on, I’ve got the quote here, let me get this. “You can understand that his motivation,” Garrison said, “Kennedy was a virile, handsome, successful man. Everything fairy was not. In addition, there was the thrill of staging the perfect crime. Remember the Loeb and Leopold case in Chicago? It was the same with Kennedy.” [laughter]

0:36:31.0 Jesse Walker: Now he moves on from this, but he still continues to be looking for… And there’s this assumption that all the gays know each other. I mean, many of them do, there’s a subculture but it goes beyond that. There’s a this… Another bit of historical context for the investigation is the so called Lavender Scare. Which was not what it was known as at the time. I think David Johnson gave it the term. He wrote a very good book, the Lavender Scare. But after World war II, there was this wave of fears of homosexual men as sex predators. And then it sort of in the ’50s flowed into the Cold War and there was worries. And a lot of people, many more people… There were worries that to be gay and working for the state department or the national security state was to be a security risk. And there was a crackdown and more people in the ’50s lost their jobs for being gay or allegedly gay than for being communist or allegedly communist, which makes sense, ’cause they’re a lot more gay people than communists in America, right? And that’s part of the backdrop to this. That in turn sometimes boomerangs, there were like rumours about Joe McCarthy being gay, for example, rumours that might have been more than rumours about J. Edgar Hoover.

0:37:47.8 Jesse Walker: And then Garrison of course manages to eventually turn this around into part of his critique of the national security state itself. But it’s a… There is even The Realist, which was Paul Krassner’s satiric magazine. That was one of the big things in the underground press in the 1960s, ran a parody in April, 1968, that one of the words had been tossed around by right wing anti-​gay cold warriors in the 50s was the Homintern sort of played on the Comintern, the Communist International, but saying homosexual international and James Curry writing under the pseudonym, Reginald Dansani, wrote this idea that this article begins with these real quotes from Garrison about it being a homosexual thrill killing and then extending from there to saying, “Well, he is exposed to the Homintern and it’s plot against Kennedy and the body politic and go… ” And actually this was mistaken for… I was praising David Johnson’s book, The Lavender Scare and I maintain my praise for it. I learned a lot from it. But one small criticism is he mistook this for a real conspiracy tract rather than a parody.

0:39:05.1 Jesse Walker: And I… [laughter] When I was writing my book about The History of Conspiracy Theories, and I was interacting a lot with Paul Krassner who published The Realist and then became something of a conspiracy theorist himself. I told him that this had happened he wrote back, “You just made my day.” Because he always loved it when people mistook his satires for the real thing. But yeah, so this is part of, this is a huge part of the backdrop to the Garrison investigation and Stone kind of has his cake and eats it too, because he’s willing to sort of draw on all this homophobic imagery and they have this sort of implicit opposition between this low life world of homosexuals and the French quarter and so on versus the family, the straight shooting family man, Jim Garrison, and this sort of undercurrent of whether he’s being pulled away from his family by this, that sort of implications of the underlying currents of the non-​heteronormative or whatever term we wanna use, world that he’s dealing with. But he doesn’t include things like Garrison thinking it was a gay thrill killing and things like that, he just sort of keeps it on the level mostly of subtext and lets Garrison be portrayed as this person motivated by other concerns.

0:40:30.0 Landry Ayres: We had mentioned what the film would look like, or a similar film might look like if released today, if they would release The Kraken as it were, if Oliver Stone would make that or if we get Oliver Stone’s, Where We Go One, We Go All or something like that. Like you can see it happening. But watching this, you see the same tactics get trotted out to sort of create this disinformation fueled, nothing is true or really like you can believe nothing type mentality of conspiratorial thinking. Now, the film was produced in the 90s, so I don’t know how much of that language is actually representative of what Jim Garrison was saying to the jury in his sort of closing arguments or whether that’s a much more modern take on what he might have argued, but there’s still that idea present in the argument that we see a lot today, and a lot of that thinking gets blamed a lot on things like technology, social media and its ability to spread and its prevalence on there.

0:41:52.6 Landry Ayres: So my question is, is this type of thinking anything new, and if it isn’t, how has it changed and what can we do about it, because it seems to me that it doesn’t seem like this type of thinking and the distrust of power and that mindset really is all that different than what was going on at least 30 years ago, if not before then, and I think that a lot of blame gets placed on things that aren’t really causes, but it might just be co-​existing symptoms.

0:42:35.5 Paul Matzko: Yes. No, it’s not at all new. I think the line from the film that best, that echoes most strongly today that you could just transpose it in the film now, is when Donald Sutherland’s X character says, “Do your own work, do your own research.” come to your own conclusions, and you can figure out this complicated conspiracy, but that’s something today, it’s like you don’t trust what the CDC says about the vaccine, go do your own work do your own research, you don’t trust that the election officials that you think that they might’ve stole in the election from Donald Trump, do your own work, do your own research, that is very much of the moment, but it is a very old sentiment, there isn’t a presidential assassination that wasn’t accompanied by a conspiracy theory.

0:43:23.6 Jesse Walker: There isn’t a presidential death that wasn’t accompanied by…

0:43:26.5 Paul Matzko: Death I should say. Yes.

0:43:27.3 Jesse Walker: Yeah, I mean like William Henry Harrison. There were conspiracy theories, it’s not just people who got shot.

0:43:33.0 Paul Matzko: Abraham Lincoln, he’s killed by… Clearly, John Wilkes Booth didn’t act alone, there was a complicated Jesuit Conspiracy because Lincoln didn’t like Northern Catholic immigrants ’cause he knew nothing something. So every Presidency is accompanied by people doing their own work, doing their own research and coming up with complicated conspiracy theories, this one has legs compared to some of those conspiracy theories for complicated reasons we can potentially get into. But no, it’s not fundamentally different today than it was back then. So I’m not sure. I think one of the mistakes though, that we tend to make is by assuming… We forget the past. We live in the eternal present. And so we just assume, Well, this is novel. This is new, but… No, no, that’s very familiar.

0:44:21.8 Jesse Walker: Yeah, I think it is interesting that this one has had such legs because… I mean there are more recent attempted assassinations, I mean not of president, but well, I mean also of president’s ’cause of Reagan, but I mean like it’s interesting that people are more interested in this than in the conspiracy theories about the attempt on the life of George Wallace, for example, because from the perspective of 2022, those are both very distant. It makes sense to me that people still talk about the Lincoln assassination, because Abraham Lincoln is arguably the most important president in US history. And this came at the end of the Civil War, which was his huge hinge point.

0:45:05.4 Paul Matzko: Though when was the last time you heard someone seriously proposed that Jesuit’s killed Lincoln I mean outside of the…

0:45:10.9 Jesse Walker: No no. But I’m saying is that there is a constant interest in the assassination that persists for obvious reasons, this is a key historical moment, it may have affected how the reconstruction proceeded and so on, and Kennedy is not just a… Not as significant as Lincoln I mean he’s not as significant as most Presidents, he was this mediocrity who didn’t accomplish much. And my general feeling is… And it’s… So why I mean sure, right after he dies, of course, people are going to be interested in why he was killed, but even the three decades later, at the time that this film came out let alone, six decades later, it’s an interesting question because I think that basically… I mean this is certainly in the case of this film, people are not imagining the actual Kennedy President we had, but the President they imagined Kennedy would have been if he had continued. In the case of Stone he imagined him ending the Cold War early and other things that were probably not on most people’s mind, and also imagined him getting us out of Vietnam, which was on a lot of people’s mind, even though… I recommend people look up and… The speech that John F. Kennedy, was going to deliver, on the day he was shot, which actually includes an explicit defense of assistance to the people fighting in Vietnam.

0:46:46.6 Paul Matzko: To that point. Yeah, and we know things now that Stone to be fair didn’t know in 91. Which is, we now have the… We have declassified archives showing that not only was Kennedy not seriously interested in withdrawing from Vietnam in private, there was all kinds of machinations behind the scenes. He approved the… He basically… They were having issues with the South Vietnamese head of state, Ngo Dinh Diem, and it was approved that he be assassinated. So, just a few weeks before his own assassination, the Kennedy administration signaled it was okay with a coup d’etat and the assassination of the south Vietnamese head of state.

0:47:22.9 Jesse Walker: Ngo Diem, which was a much more consequential assassination in terms of…

0:47:26.9 Paul Matzko: It was.

0:47:27.2 Jesse Walker: How the Vietnam war proceeded, and that was…

0:47:30.6 Paul Matzko: But people didn’t know that at the time…

0:47:31.9 Jesse Walker: Well…

0:47:32.1 Paul Matzko: That wasn’t known until later. Right?

0:47:33.9 Jesse Walker: We have much firmer evidence of it now, but people were talking about Kennedy being involved with it then and it was clearly the case that there was some advanced knowledge in the United States. But I think for a lot… There is this sort of period that’s book ended by Oswald and Hinckley. It feels like it starts in 1963 people looking back retroactively when suddenly we have this string of assassinations, we have all these riots, we have the Vietnam war. We have all this social change. It carries all the way up through things like Jonestown, and finally seems to die down at the beginning of the 1980s. And these are seen as forgive the expression, like the opening shots of that period. And imagining that Kennedy is not killed, becomes a way of imagining that the United States doesn’t go through this incredibly bruising experience. In my view, if Kennedy… If Oswald had succeeded in killing General Walker a little earlier and had been arrested, and Kennedy goes through Dealey Plaza without being shot, what happens? Well, we still go into Vietnam and without the… And then without the the wave of sympathy for the assassination that helped LBJ so much in terms of getting stuff, through the legislature, we do not get as much liberal reform in the sixties.

0:49:01.3 Jesse Walker: It’s things like the civil rights act of 1964 might just might not have happened, or at least not in 1964, might not have happened so quickly. And that raises the possibility of yet more turmoil over the course of that decade. It’s very… I feel like there’s a very strong chance that the world in which Kennedy lives not only whether you’re a person who wishes that all that turmoil didn’t happen, or you’re a person who wishes that you had a reformer friend in the white house that you see, Johnson and Nixon as not being. That you would be actually much less happy with that alternate timeline. That’s purely speculative, but that kind of… And in some ways, I’ve realized I’m coming here and offering a more cynical take on politics than Oliver Stone offers [laughter] in his movie. But that was one of the most powerful political critiques, as opposed to historical, like, is this detail right? Or is this detail wrong? Was that… This movie was… And then this was also true just in general of a lot of the 1970s wave of suspicions.

0:50:14.6 Jesse Walker: A lot of it, people imagined that there had been one great president, just not so long ago. And they took him away from us, that was John F. Kennedy, and I’m afraid you can’t even have that comfort, that that’s a… There’s in this… In the summation there are two different moments that kind of are in tension with each other. There’s a part where talking about how the government won’t release these files, which I think was a legitimate complaint of Oliver Stones. He has Costner saying, “The government considers you children who might be too disturbed to face this reality.” In same speech, he has the line that says, “We have all become hamlets in our country, children of a slain father, leader, whose killers still possesses the throne.” Which of course infantilizes the whole country. And there’s this kind of this authoritarian impulse that would sort of reduces us to children. And there’s this anti authoritarian impulse that says we don’t have to be children. And Oliver Stone is sort of caught in between these two different directions.

0:51:22.4 Paul Matzko: And this, I think is the key answers to the question of what do we do about kind of rampant conspiracism, ’cause we are in another such moment right now, is I think transparency, if conspiracism flourishes as a function in the vacuum left by institutional distrust, learned institutional distrust, as people find out that the government has been lying to them, then the best way to combat conspiracism and rebuild trust institutions is transparency. So, this movie, for example, leads Congress to pass a law that accelerates the release of the Kennedy assassination records, the war and commission papers and so on. But in general, I think the… One of the key tool… One of the key responses to concerns about the effects of conspiracism of American democracy is to stop lying. [chuckle] Stop covering records up, release them and treat people like adults, not like children.

0:52:19.4 Paul Matzko: And that removes a lot of the fuel and the energy behind rampant conspiracy theories, which are always gonna be with us. You’re never gonna get rid of conspiracy theories, but that’s the oxygen that gives them fuel. The idea the government’s hiding something. In fact, maybe I can just say the government is actually still hiding things about the Kennedy assassination. There are still thousands of documents that were supposed to be released. Donald Trump said that he would release him if he won the second term, then Joe Biden has released some more, but there’s still some being held back, which most of which likely point the best guess that credentialed historians have about who have studied the Kennedy assassination, is that they have to do with the CIA surveillance of Oswald in Mexico city, that the CIA knew that he had visited the Soviet and Cuban consulates in Mexico city in the summer of 1963, that he had in various places at parties during untapped phone calls had essentially threatened to kill president Kennedy.

0:53:21.9 Paul Matzko: Now whether or not, either anyone took them seriously, whether or not the Soviets or Cubans took those claims seriously or encouraged him to act on that is unknown. It’s possible he just was, he was a bit of a braggadocio and narcissistic kind of guy Oswald. So we don’t know whether, but it was embarrassing to the CIA that they had him under surveillance, that they heard him threaten to kill the president and didn’t stop him. And so the coverup, the real coverup, the CIA’s own internal historian in 2013 released a history of the CIA’s response to the Kennedy assassination is that they destroyed documents and stonewalled the Warren commission about the CIA’s own role in surveillance Mexico city, because it made them look bad, right? So there is stuff that the government still covers up, which again, provides fuel. So Oliver Stone’s latest 20 year retrospective or 30 year retrospective, I suppose, on the movie still is making hay off this idea, the government’s hiding stuff. So stop hiding the things, more transparency, that’s my answer.

0:54:24.5 Landry Ayres: I made it about 30 minutes into the new documentary. ‘Cause I was like, I’ll watch that before we have this conversation. And I made it half an hour in and was like, I can’t, I can’t do this anymore. I was like, it’s… And it was all of the conspiratorial, like factoid dumping of the 1991 movie with none of the fun qualities of it.

0:54:45.2 Jesse Walker: You needed to hire back the theme editor maybe. Yeah. I mean, I went through the journey of… When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I read a couple of JFK conspiracy books. And I was like, yeah, yeah, because I mean, you’re just seeing like them finding the anomalies, you know, and in some cases, later on turned out not to be anomalies. In some cases I could see there was a problem, like Coup d’etat in America had these pictures of the tramps arrested that day. And next to these pictures of E. Howard hunt and Frank Sturgis of Watergate fame. And they were, “See they’re the same people.” That that’s very blurry too. I mean…

[laughter]

0:55:29.2 Jesse Walker: This is consistent with it being the same person, but also consistent with it being about a million other people, but still, I mean, despite some things clearly being not all that credible, I felt like yeah, it seems to me more likely than not that there was a conspiracy. And that was still my feeling when I first saw the movie, although I knew enough to know that Jim Garrison was not the best spokesperson from that point of view.

[laughter]

0:55:58.1 Jesse Walker: And it became gradually, you know, it switched to me thinking more likely than not that there was no conspiracy, but it’s been a… I can appreciate how the umbrella man thing, the person who was holding that umbrella came forward in I think 1978 and explained what was going on. This was actually something, a bunch of people on the right would do, to sort of like, it was like some elaborate thing where the umbrellas were supposed to represent Neville Chamberlain, because they were accusing Kennedy of being like Chamberlain. And this guy claimed that he actually didn’t necessarily buy into that, but he heard that it bothered Kennedy and he just sort of wanted to troll him.

0:56:36.8 Jesse Walker: He didn’t use that word back then. So he went ahead and did that. So he did this and more than a decade after he came forward, I hear the umbrella man thing as this unexplained detail. And it was more than a decade after that, before I found out what had happened. I mean, so much of this… People talk about the internet making it easier to spread things, conspiracy stories. It also makes it so much easier to quickly look up and see if anyone has attempted to debunk something. I have this memory and this must have been around the time JFK came out. It was definitely in the early 90s. It might have been pegged to the movie, but I was listening to this late night talk show, just with some friends when says, “Hey, they’re talking about the JFK assassination. Let’s listen.” And it was like, it was this sort of crap. They didn’t have someone they were interviewing. They were just having people call in with stuff they’d heard.

[laughter]

0:57:25.1 Jesse Walker: And it was like this sort of crowdsourcing. And there was one person who said, you were saying that Kennedy had affairs, but actually I heard there was just this woman. She made that up. Yeah? Yeah. All right. Next caller, you know, I mean, this is… [laughter] I actually encountered that rumor another time. This was not just one guy saying it, you know, and I’d say, people who’ve who have this… Of course Paul was a historian of right wing talk radio, so he knows night calling shows in the period you’re talking about, your early 60s, but the internet is in no way unique in its ability to spread dubious stories and to the extent that it spreads them faster, it does make it easier to at least see what other people are claiming in a way that sitting in Southeastern Michigan, listening to a weirdo radio show is not.

0:58:21.9 Paul Matzko: And the umbrella man’s such a great little cautionary tale too. There’s a Morris mini documentary about the umbrella man, which is very amusing. But it’s a great cautionary tale in that, the irony is that conspiracy theorizing tends to be predicated on the idea that there’s this complicated truth out there. Where through careful self-​study and analysis, you can get to the heart of the truth. It’s meant to be… It frames itself as rational, skeptical, and critical. But the reality is it tends to be very highly accepting of all kinds of ill sourced, thinly, evidenced rumors that spread around. And it always assumes that nothing is a matter of happenstance.

0:59:04.4 Paul Matzko: There’s no such thing as circumstance or, you know, everything play is a little piece in this complicated web of lies and conspiracy. So the umbrella man, well, he must be sinister, who has a black umbrella standing near the grassy knoll on the, of sunny, relatively warm November day in Texas, and well, that it’s gotta be sinister. Maybe there’s a little flechette in the umbrella, and that was one of the key shots came from the umbrella man as the president went by. It’s gotta be sinister. But the reality is that, yeah, it was essentially a pre-​digital trolling act that with a… Read like that in 1963, but by the time it metastasizes and becomes part of the conspiracy theories, it’s 15 years later.

0:59:53.9 Jesse Walker: It’s fallen out of the context.

0:59:54.5 Paul Matzko: So the original reference point it’s fallen out of the context. So the black umbrella thing was very common in the 1940s, post World War II context, people being like never again, we’re gonna be like Chamberlain at Munich with his black umbrella doing appeasement. We’re not gonna have a policy of appeasement during the Cold War. That was still echoing 15 years later in 1963, enough that it made sense as a troll in Dallas. It’s no long echoing 15 years past that in the late 70s. To put that in context today, it’d be like right now, if you were to show up in front of a Supreme Court Justice’s house wearing handmaid’s tail garb, everyone would immediately get what you were referencing. Like, “Oh, I get you’re trolling them saying that because you’re voting this way on abortion, you’re about to turn us into a theocratic state where women are gonna be handmaid’s.” But 50 years from now, maybe even less, that might have more legs because it’s a very popular novel than the umbrella thing, which is a little bit more niche, but it’s 50 years from now, people will be like, “Why are they wearing that weird clothing out in front of Supreme… ” You’ll see a picture and be like, “Well, that must be sinister, there must be something…

1:01:02.1 Jesse Walker: You can see a week old tweet and not have any idea what it’s referring to, because it’s just something that…

1:01:08.0 Landry Ayres: I do it all the time.

1:01:11.6 Jesse Walker: I mean hell, you can see something an hour old, something that’s big enough that everybody’s making references to it, if you were offline that day, you’re not gonna understand it later. I will occasionally think, someday somebody’s gonna find some old tweet of mine and interpret it and who knows… I’m not saying the problematic tweet, I mean the completely incoherent tweet. Somebody is gonna try to make sense of. Yeah, and this kind of speaks to Paul’s other point speaks to you said earlier about, “Do you own research.” I am all for people doing their own research, I just wish they were better at researching. I wish people would learn the kind of things you have to do in order to do research and how much context you’re missing, and I have found… Things that I understand because I know… Going through historical work and I’ve spoken to people involved and I’ve read documents and put things together that other people in my view have missed, and then later find out there’s yet more context I didn’t have that adds more illumination to it. It doesn’t even mean that I got it wrong, it means there’s always extra dimensions and that just gets lost in a lot of these knife hunts that people end up taking.

[music]

1:02:30.8 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more pop & locked content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod, that’s pop, the letter N, lock with an E, like the philosopher pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time.