Five Wild JFK Conspiracy Theories (original) (raw)
Filmmaker Oliver Stone on the cover-ups still troubling him today
Warner Brothers/courtesy Everett Collection
November 22, 1963 was just another Friday for 17-year-old Oliver Stone, then a student at The Hill School in suburban Philadelphia. Then, at 1:30 p.m. (12:30 p.m. CST), his life changed forever with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. "I took it like everyone else – shocked and horrified," Stone told Rolling Stone in a recent interview. "But I didn't realize all the implications. It was sold to us that Johnson was fulfilling Kennedy's mandates and there was no discontinuity. That's absolutely not true considering what I've learned since then." What follows are five cover-ups the director stumbled upon while researching JFK, his Oscar-winning 1991 film.
Lee Harvey Oswald
"The American people have been constantly polled since 1963, and the figures remain very high that they don't believe it. It's always the media that pushes this 'Oswald did it alone' thing. It doesn't work. He did not pull the trigger. There was no chain of evidence that indicates that he pulled the trigger. He was questioned thoroughly and illegally, and what he said was recorded and put out by the Dallas police. It was a disastrous investigation. He remains an alleged assassin because he was arrested, but he was shot before anything could come out. He couldn't even get in a full-length press conference."
Warren Commission
"It's all quite shocking when you think seriously about it. It doesn't make any sense the way it's been described. That's the most shocking part of the case. When you start to investigate Oswald, there are a thousand interesting things that come up. The files on Oswald were much more closely supervised by the CIA then we knew at the time, and were omitted by the Warren Commission. They treated it like a routine investigation, but it was hardly so."
Alan Dulles
"The cover-up is filled with a cast of characters. That is to say, the Warren Commission – who were in charge of the investigation – and the 'main man,' Alan Dulles, the ex-chief of the CIA and one of the most powerful figures in government. He was fired by Kennedy, as were all his top officials, two years earlier. And he was put in charge of the investigation and buried certain information. That's part of the cover-up."
JFK Records Act
"We don't know how many records the government has. But we know from former Washington Post writer Jefferson Morley that, on October 25 in the Dallas Morning News, the CIA has acknowledged that, in a sworn affidavit, the agency retains 1,100 records related to the assassination that have never been made public. These files are not believed relevant to the death, but they concern the operation with six CIA employees involved in the JFK story who reported directly to James Angleton, the head of the CIA's counterintelligence staff, and Deputy Director Richard Helms. These people were not investigated and they hated Kennedy."
ARRB and the Secret Service
"The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) went into extensive filing on the autopsy, which indicates that there is a major medical fraud that occurred. The autopsy should have been done in Dallas at Parkland Memorial Hospital. The head indicated that the exit wound was a huge exit blast on the right rear side of his head. But the Secret Service destroyed the ARRB files in 1995. That was criminal. And the ARRB noted it. That kind of stuff goes on all the time. It's just blurred out in the news."