In one of my discussions about the JFK assassination on you tube videos, someone suggested that I could watch Oliver Stone’s new documentary "JFK Revisited" for free by signing up on Showtime for a free trial. I had said I would not pay for conspiracy theory. So, wanting to be informed on all sides of the case as much as humanly possible, but without paying for conspiracy theory, I signed up and have watched the film a couple of times, using the rewind function repeatedly too.
I must admit that his latest film is better than his famous movie JFK, in some ways, because JFK was a dramatic fantasy apparently conceived out of thin air and based on virtually no evidence. In this new film, many apparent experts and researchers are presented who ask questions about specific pieces of evidence and the actions of doctors and authorities related to the case, instead of making a glamorous piece of fiction. So I give him credit for that. On the other hand, it does not even try to present a case against any particular perpetrator or organization, unlike what Jim Garrison the lawyer portrayed in JFK did, who in real life charged Clay Shaw with the JFK assassination. At the end of the film, Stone and Donald Sutherland narrate the supposed assassination motive of folks from the military-industrial complex and the CIA who wanted to continue the Vietnam War and a more-aggressive foreign policy which JFK wanted to end, and thus wanted JFK dead. But attributing such a motive to the JFK killing does not prove anything about what actually happened.
Without going into total detail on every issue cited in the film, I will cover a lot of the most relevant questions it raises. Some points I can easily refute; others maybe not so easily, but their relevance remains itself very questionable. Much of what Oliver Stone and his experts present as evidence in this film that Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot JFK or do it alone is based on poor judgments and out of date information. For example, it is argued that the rifle Oswald mail-ordered from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago is not the one found on the 6th floor of the School Book Depository. But it seems like they are comparing the Depository rifle with the picture in the ad from which Oswald ordered the rifle, and it is well known that Klein’s did not send Oswald the exact same kind or size of rifle pictured in the ad.
Another obvious error concerns 2 lady witnesses who didn’t see Oswald coming down from the 6th floor after the shooting. This proves Oswald was not there, the film says. But the film admits that these witnesses came down from the 4th floor to the street in about a minute, and that Oswald took about 2 minutes. Obviously they did not see Oswald because they came down before he did. But apparently they mentioned this only because the Warren Commission lengthened the times it took the women to get down the stairs. So, the Warren Commission (WC) got that wrong by a minute or two, but the facts still do not refute that Oswald was indeed on the 6th floor during the shooting. In fact, the actual facts recounted in the film show even more clearly that the ladies got down the stairs first. So what’s the point?
Warren Commission testimony of Victoria Adams, who came down the stairs before Oswald
Let's get this version of events clear. Victoria Adams testified that she and Sandra Styles waited "15 to 30 seconds" at the 4th floor window after the shots to observe the scene, and then "ran" from the window down the stairs to the 1st floor doorway and out the building in "less than a minute". Oswald remained on the 6th floor for a whole minute, first lingering at the window making sure he hit the target, "slowly" withdrawing his rifle according to Howard Brennan, and then hiding his rifle in the boxes diagonally across the room by the stairs. After that minute, Adams and Styles were already at least half way down their 3 flights of stairs. Oswald then started down the stairs, and reached the 2nd floor at least 30 seconds after starting down from the 6th floor. It probably took him longer than the 90 total seconds after the shots, as stated in the Frontline video, but not much longer. 90 seconds and probably less after the shots, Adams and Styles were already out of the building. The most that can be claimed is that they were above the 2nd floor on the stairs when Oswald started down from the 6th. They would not have seen him, and it's sheer unfounded speculation to claim they would have heard his footsteps from 3 or 4 flights down from him.
Gerald Posner reports in Case Closed, however, regarding the two men, Depository employees Billy Lovelady and Bill Shelley, that Adams and Styles say they saw after they quickly came down the stairs and went outside, Billy and Bill said they did not return to the Depository until 5 minutes after the shots. So Posner estimates that Adams and Styles did not come down the stairs until at least 5 minutes after the shots. The Warren Commission mentioned this descrepancy as well. Lovelady and Shelley said they re-entered the Depository building at the rear door where Victoria Adams saw them, and they said they saw a gril they believe was Adams, but this was several minutes after Baker and Truly entered the building. See https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/chapter-4.html#actions page 154. So Victoria Adams' timing is in doubt.
Although the evidence is clear that Marina took pictures of Lee Oswald holding his rifle from the only camera, Marina’s, that could have taken it, and other questions about the photos have been dispelled, like the direction of shadows, and the fact that Oswald signed the back of one of them and gave it to his well-known friend George, all implicates Oswald, Stone’s film finds another reason to doubt the pictures by saying that in the latter picture he had a ring on a different finger than he did in the first two pictures. But there is no proof that Oswald didn’t move the ring between taking the photos, perhaps to make holding the rifle easier as he switched hands, and the hands look so unclear in the pictures anyway that it’s hard to tell whether he in fact he had one ring on each finger for all three pictures. And really, what does this prove? That Oswald was right that his head was pasted on the three pictures? That is absurd on its face, and this charge was dismissed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) after very careful investigations.
An obvious omission in JFK Revisited occurs about Oswald’s fingerprints on the rifle. The 1993 Frontline documentary Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald shows the HSCA fingerprint expert, having recently recovered pictures of the fingerprints, able to show 18 points of ID between Oswald’s prints and those on the rifle. Conspiracy critics consistently refuse to watch this excellent documentary, and to update their knowledge about this fingerprint identification. Such critics obviously include Oliver Stone and his experts.
The chain of custody of the "magic bullet" (also known as CE399) is questioned in the film, which says it must be clear to pass muster at a trial. The film says the first people who picked up the bullet don’t remember it, and that the initials one secret service agent put on the bullet are gone while the other three remain. This agent, Mr. Todd, also put the wrong time on his affadavit. But the other three initials are still valid, and I don’t think people can be expected to remember exactly about the bullet they saw. They did not examine it closely. But if the bullet was planted, this raises far more questions than it answers. This bullet was proven to be fired from Oswald’s gun by accepted ballistic science. It was the same kind of bullet as the others Oswald used with his gun, including the one still left unfired in the rifle found on the 6th floor. So how would anyone be able to find another bullet with these traits and bring it to the stretcher upon which Governor Connally had been lying at the hospital at the exact time needed? Did CIA agents or MAFIA goons or Cuban exiles go to Oswald’s house, search around without being seen and find some bullets for his Carcano rifle, take them to wherever the rifle was (probably still at the Depository or at the police station being examined), fire the rifle somewhere, find the bullet, and take it to Parkland and put it on Connally’s exact stretcher before it was found there after the assassination?
Much is asserted about the autopsy, as is common among JFK conspiracy theorists and other skeptics, and they claim in this film that autopsy photos didn’t show the big wound in the right-back of his head. But it’s well-known that his remaining scalp and its hair were placed and combed over the hole, and that pictures were taken of his head this way. They are not claimed to be the autopsy photos. The doctors who treated JFK at Parkland who were shown later examining the real autopsy photos in the 1988 PBS NOVA documentary narrated by Walter Chronkite, were not the same doctors that Stone cited as JFK’s doctors in this film who were unsure about the wounds. Doctors McClelland, Peters, Dulany and Jenkins in the NOVA film said the autopsy photos they saw matched what they remembered of JFK’s condition at Parkland. These autopsy photos were apparently taken before the "inexperienced" forensic doctors at Bethesda even started their autopsy.
Skeptics assert dogmas like exit wounds must be larger than entry wounds, but there is no such true dogma. Stone’s cited doctors, Crenshaw, Perry and Clark, said they were unsure whether the entry wounds were in front or in back, and Crenshaw even asserted they were in the front. It is even asserted that CIA agent Elmer Moore was ordered to pressure Dr. Perry to claim that the "magic bullet"’s entrance wound was in the back of JFK’s neck and not the front. (In case anyone doesn’t know, the "magic bullet" or single bullet that hit both JFK in the neck and Connally in several places was given that title by skeptics who claim this is impossible.) But if the "magic bullet" entered JFK’s neck in front, and exited in the back, the asserted trajectory was so straight that the shooter would have been standing (or even sitting down) in the street right in front of the car, and visible to everyone in Dealey Plaza. And the bullet would somehow have had to avoid hitting Connally who was sitting in front of him. Conspiracy buffs still cite the Zapruder film as showing the head shot came from the grassy knoll. But the film as I see it clearly shows the shot hitting JFK in the right-back of the head and blood and tissue coming out of the right front side of his head and above it. The debris was pushed forward by the bullet striking from behind. A hard military bullet striking solid head bone in the back of JFK’s head would naturally create a large wound there, and debris would have come out in all directions, including in back of him when he moved his head that way. And the bullet fragments recovered were found in his head and his car seat, not behind him where they would have been had the bullet exited the back of JFK’s head. Nor were any bullet fragments or bullet wounds found on the left side of his head, nor any bullet to the left beyond his head, both possible places where it could have gone if shot from the grassy knoll. Those examining the Zapruder film, as Dan Rather did before it was sent to Life Magazine, can see that JFK's head moved forward in relation to the seat backing in the car from frame 312 to frame 313 and 314. His head's subsequent move backward was the result of nervous trauma. Experiments in Cold Case JFK by NOVA and others show that a backward movement could result from a shot to the back of the head.
Much is often made of the drawings made by Dr. Humes and the others at Bethesda, but these are not photographs, and they are inaccurate and made from memory. Because of these pictures, Stone’s experts accuse the Warren Commission of raising the level of the entry wound in back from "T3" vertebrae to "T6" vertebrae so that it would fit the single bullet theory. But this 1977 medical study based on actual autopsy photos showed the bullet hit T6 as asserted by the single bullet theory.
Oswald is asserted by a lady narrator, without any evidence, to have participated in anti-Castro Cuban exile military trainings. But the evidence that he knew or met such people is very thin. The 1993 Frontline doc says he met with some Cuban exile leader and his 2 daughters named Odio in Dallas just before going to Mexico (perhaps to try to get to Cuba) in late September 1963. It is also claimed in the Stone film that he met Guy Banister in New Orleans that Summer, and the 1993 Frontline doc suggested this as well. Banister was a right wing organizer of anti-Castro militias. The main evidence for his association with Banister continues to be that he used the address of 544 Camp Street on his pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee self-made leaflets. According to the 1993 Frontline documentary, Oswald was seen with Banister in a coffee shop on the ground floor of 544 Camp Street. But Banister did not have an office there for the previous year and a half, although he apparently had one around the corner. And no evidence exists that Oswald was ever assigned or used an office there to make his leaflets. My theory is that he did not want to use his home address on his leaflets, although he used it on his fake membership cards for his organization that no-one joined, so he picked that Camp Street address as a diversion tactic.
It is asserted that Oswald was "connected" to organizations of Cubans in Miami, but the fact is the Fair Play for Cuba Committee rejected Oswald’s application to start a chapter in New Orleans, and his unrecognized branch organization never had more than one member: Oswald himself. Joe Inides is cited as running a group of Cubans against Castro, and then stonewalling HSCA chief investigator Blakey about it, but there was no connection of this group to Oswald. Oswald made clear why he might have contacted Banister, and also why he contacted Carlos Bringuier to offer to join his anti-Castro group in New Orleans, as mentioned by other accounts. Oswald’s purpose, he said in his diary, was to spy on him, and the way people do that is to join the enemy of your cause-- which for Oswald was "fair play for Cuba" and fighting for Castro. That may have been what he was doing with the Odios in Dallas too. When he went to Mexico to apply for a visa to Cuba and Russia, he showed the agents there his resume that asserted he was a street agitator for Castro who had infiltrated anti-Castro groups. This is all well proven by the Frontline doc. So there is no question who’s side he was on, and that was also his chief motive for killing JFK too, because JFK was Castro’s nemesis.
Oswald was heavily watched by the CIA before the assassination, and especially by Otto Otepka (an FBI mole inside the State Dept.) who kept track of defectors to the Soviet Union. It is asserted that just before the assassination Otepka was framed for a crime and removed from his job. This document is all I can find on this, which says he was dismissed on Nov.5 for leaking. Agent Angelton then testified to the WC that the CIA had no information on Oswald, Stone claims. But this article says "Acknowledged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's life in the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1962, support for Castro and contacts with Cuban and Soviet diplomats in Mexico City dominated the CIA's interest in Oswald and Angleton's attention." It seems that much became known about the activities of Angelton later.
Another claim about the CIA says that Mr. Geesling removed a "flash" designation that meant nothing could be added or examined from Oswald’s file without permission from CIA counter-intelligence. The expert in the film claims that this meant there would be no reason to keep Oswald on the "security index." If he had stayed on this index, this might have prevented Oswald from working in a building above the motorcade route. But this is not direct evidence that Oswald WAS actually removed from a security index. To carry out what was needed by Oswald’s listing on the security index, and presumably keep the president safe, the CIA or Secret Service would have had to get Oswald fired or suspended from his job at the Depository during the week before the assassination, because the motorcade route was not decided upon until Nov.18. Obviously, it's true that they did not do this. But remember also that Marina Oswald’s live-in friend Ruth Paine and her neighbors arranged for Oswald’s job there about 6 weeks prior to the assassination, not the CIA or anyone else. Conspiracy buffs tend to forget this.
The final claim I will mention from the film is about a plot to assassinate Kennedy in Chicago on Nov.2 that never was carried out. The Stone film claims that 4 gunmen were detected but did not admit anything, and we therefore know nothing about whether they were actually US government agents, but then the film claims that a patsy was found who was similar to Oswald who could be blamed, and who worked in a building above the parade route. Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden, a young black man appointed by JFK, reported that security was lax in Chicago and that this plot had been kept secret, among other agency misdeeds. According to this article by ABC7 Chicago, Bolden revealed a Cuban plot and how the FBI spoiled an informant's cover, and how the trip was scrubbed after another potential assassin was arrested. Elmer Moore, who had pressured Dr. Perry according to the Stone film, was asked about Bolden by an independent researcher and Moore pointedly said "we finally got him." Bolden was accused of leaking secrets about these and other plots, fired and sentenced to jail for 6 years. "It is an incredible story of corruption and racism in a government agency that wasn’t willing to make room for a man who honored integrity" says this article. To me this seems evidence of a government agency not facing up to its mistakes. That seems to me one reason why our government has not been forthcoming in many other instances as well. The detention of Julian Assange comes to mind, and the detention or exile of whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. But this is not direct evidence about who killed JFK. Was it evidence that the CIA and Secret Service planned to allow Oswald to shoot Kennedy with these 3 coverups, and that they then planned the motorcade route to go by the Depository? How did they know Oswald would shoot him? Was it part of their plan to have Oswald shoot JFK? Why has no evidence ever been found of such a CIA plot, other than these supposed allowances and cover-ups?
The issues raised in JFK Revisited are but a fraction of all the questions and accusations made about the assassination by conspiracy theorists, researchers and believers in the theories. But the facts implicating Oswald remain intact. His photos with the assassination rifle are not discredited just because of a ring on his finger. It is still shown by all evidence to be his rifle. Those nearest to Oswald during the shooting, such as Harold Norman right below him, heard three distinct shots, not four or five. The trajectory of the magic bullet remains intact too, based on where Kennedy and Connally were sitting and where the bullets struck the two men. The only intact bullet that hit JFK was known through ballistics science to have been fired exclusively from Oswald’s rifle that we know he had ordered through the mail and that he left on the 6th floor, and the bullet fragments found in JFK’s car and skull prove the same, as do the three cartridges from the rifle left on the 6th floor, the fibers found on the rifle from Oswald’s shirt-- and Oswald’s fingerprints on the rifle, on the package he carried the rifle in, and on the sniper’s nest boxes on which he held his gun; all prove Oswald’s guilt. So do his previous attempt to shoot General Walker, as proven also by ballistic analysis of that bullet linked to this same rifle, as well as by his own written and oral statements, and his subsequent and well-proven murder of Officer J.D. Tippit, who had stopped him based on witness accounts given over police radio, and who might have taken him into custody; followed by his attempted murder of still another cop at the Texas Theater. And Oswald was the only employee of the Depository to leave the building right after the shooting.
Why did Oswald leave such a trail of evidence behind him? I think in his mind he had proved himself a hero for socialism and Castro. That’s why he gave the militant salute at the police station. If he could have covered all his tracks, he would not have been famous. Remember how Oswald insisted on being fingerprinted and going to jail after being arrested for disturbing the peace while passing out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans? An infinite number of questions can be asked, but the conspiracy theorists don’t seem to be able to touch the basic facts proving that Oswald, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy.
The Reason for Conspiracies, by E. Alan Meece with many links to articles on the JFK assassination
Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald by Frontline, longer 1993 version
Who Shot President Kennedy by NOVA with Walter Chronkite
Cold Case JFK by NOVA (with repeats at the end) examines the shots and the autopsy photos