
JFK and the popular mind
Robin Ramsay.

There are certain events in American history which serve as the focal
points of ideological struggle between left and right: the 1930s
depression, the entry of the USA into World War II, the guilt or innocence
of Alger Hiss - and the Kennedy assassination . Take the massive
Anglo-American media attention devoted to Edward J. Epstein's book Legend
in 1973. In that Epstein sought to re-establish the Warren Commission's
verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald alone did the dirty deed; but adding to it
the suggestion t hat he had been got at by the KGB. Oswald was still a
'lone nut' but somehow the KGB's 'lone nut'. In fact, despite spending a
great deal of Readers=D5 Digest research money, Epstein found no evidence
that Oswald was KGB, and his rehash of the Warren Comm-i ssion's version
of the shooting in Dallas was as inept as its progenitor. Why did he do
it? Epstein was by then the spokesman for James Jesus Angleton, the
paranoid former head of CIA Counter Intelligence who had been sacked in
1974. Angleton believed that Oswald was KGB because a KGB defector to the
CIA called Nosenko had sai d that he (Oswald) wasn=D5t KGB, and Angleton
believed that Nosenko was a false defector. Angleton had also been very
close to the Israeli government since the late 1940s and in 1978 the
Israeli government - and the Israeli lobby in the United States - were
 enthusiastic supporters of the Second Cold War then being cranked up in
the United States. The logic of the position looked like this: Israel
needed continued U.S. support, and that support had been waning ever since
the OPEC oil price rise of 1973. Such support could best be ensured by
presenting Israel as the United States' most reliable, ant i-Soviet ally
in the Middle East. (There are the occasional hints that Israeli
intelligence had a hand in the Italian 'strategy of tension' simply to
help undermine U.S. confidence in Italy, Israel's main regional rival in
the Friends-of-the-USA contest.)
 But the Israeli role was only plausible if there actually was a perceived
Soviet 'threat'. Epstein's repackaging of Oswald as KGB was a handy,
bite-sized piece of psychological warfare in that campaign. If we add the
final pieces; that the CIA seems to have had some kind of relationship
with the Reader's Digest - who funded Epstein's 'research' - since the
early years of the First Cold War; that Epstein's book appeared in time to
pre-empt the report of t he House Select Committee on Assassinations, then
you have the pieces in a puzzle to which only Epstein knows the solution.
Fourteen years and three disastrous terms of infantile rightwing
Republican government later, Oliver Stone reworks the shooting in Dallas
from a (vaguely) left perspective. And - to no-one's surprise - where
Epstein's version got oceans of sycophantic att ention in the
Anglo-American media, Stone gets hammered before the film has even been
shot. At the centre of the Stone movie are Jim Garrison, the New Orleans
DA, and Clay Shaw, the gay businessman Garrison charged with conspiracy to
kill the President. How things change. . . Two years ago issue 20 of
Lobster included a long analysis of the UK n ames in Clay Shaw's address
book. It evinced one letter, from a Daily Mirror journalist, who described
the piece as 'quintessential Lobster'- i.e. of interest to few,
fascinating nonetheless, and unlikely to find a publisher anywhere else.
When Stone's mo vie was released here he rang to ask if he could use the
Shaw material in a piece he thought he had sold to the Sunday Times. (The
story didn't appear, in the end.) But Shaw had gone from being
ultra-obscure to mainstream in about 3 months - thanks to JFK . When did a
cultural event change the climate so fast and so permanently in this
country? 'Cathy Come Home' in the mid sixties? I liked Stone's film,
despite its sentimentality, the soapy domestic scenes chez 'Garrison' and
the preposterous closing speech. It is a remarkable piece of mainstream
narrative cinema (with one dazzling cameo from Ed Asner as Guy Bannister).
My only mino r quibble would be that missing from Stone's narrative are
the people who published criticisms of the Warren Commission Report before
Jim Garrison began in 1967. Credit where credit is due: that the Warren
Commission didn't get away with their snow job ab out Oswald, is down to
the work of the assassination buffs. In 1964 virtually the entire U.S.
establishment - media, politicians, U.S. state authorities, CIA etc. -
agreed on the 'lone nut' solution. Against them were ranged a handful of
Americans - a goo dly proportion of them women, Mae Brussel and Sylvia
Meagher, for example - who knew they were being sold a pup and refused to
buy it. Facing massive hostility, ridicule and, in some cases, harassment
from the state authorities, the JFK assassination buff s persisted and
eventually overturned the official version of reality. This is a
remarkable achievement that Stone might just have nodded towards. Finally,
the impact of the film illustrates the problems for the security apparatus
of the nation state now represented by the global media. Twenty or thirty
years ago it was possible for the National Security apparatus to put out a
line to its agents of influence inside the mass media - as the CIA did
against Jim Garrison, Mark Lane and other critics of the Warren Commission
- and what was called 'the mighty Wurlitzer' of CIA propaganda would crank
into action. These days it is more difficult to rubbish a book or film out
of existence. The pre-release assaults on Stone in the U.S. media served
simply as global PR for the film. The U.S. government has not yet learned
the lesson the British state learned during its attempts to suppress Spy
Catcher.=20



