How much truth in jfk movie

Russo claimed he attended a party at Dave Ferrie's New Orleans apartment where a Clay "Bertrand" and Oswald was present, and there they discussed the plot to kill JFK by "triangulation of crossfire". David Ferrie came into the conspiracy as a result of Jack S. It is known that Martin held a grudge against Ferrie. In the movie, a claim is made that Ferrie's name keeps "popping up" among Oswald's associates, but not a single person claimed to have seen Oswald and Ferrie together that summer in New Orleans.

Martin also claimed that Ferrie may have hypnotized Oswald into killing the president, among various other misleading and often spiteful information regarding Ferrie. What Richard Helms really said was this: "one time, as a businessman, [Clay Shaw] was one of the part-time contacts of the Domestic Contact Division". Shaw was one of literally thousands of US citizens debriefed each year about their travels and contacts abroad by the DCS.

He was never a contract agent, and thus was never paid. Garrison couldn't get any other people other than Russo to identify Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand and though Garrison scoured the area for potential witnesses he could find none Jim Garrison's method was to make up a theory, then find people to back the theory. In real life, during the time Andrews claimed he got the phone call from a "Bertrand" to represent Oswald, that he was down with pneumonia, in a state of delirium and heavily sedated in Hotel Dieu Hospital.

There is no conclusive evidence to prove this. In the movie, there is a scene where the officer booking Clay Shaw asks for aliases, and Clay Shaw replies, "Clay Bertrand". In reality, this never happened. Clay Shaw did not at any time admit using an alias. In a booking procedure such as this, a field arrest form would be supplied to the booking officer that would include any aliases used by the arrestee; which raises the questions: 1.

Why would Officer Habighorst need to question the arrestee when all the information was supplied to him? Why would an alleged covert CIA field agent divulge his secret identity without hesitation? Further evidence contrary to Officer Habighorst's claim comes from Sgt. Jonas Butzman who was assigned to guard Shaw during the booking who said that Habighorst did not question Shaw and that the name "Bertrand" was never spoken.

However, this does not show that Kennedy had resigned himself to a Communist victory in Vietnam. At the time of the assassination, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was cracking down on internal dissidents in his country. Diem's heavy handed tactics were throwing the country into chaos and providing potential propaganda fodder for the Communist North Vietnamese.

In response to this, Kennedy conceived of bringing home 1, of the more then 15, American troops already in South Vietnam as a way to "express our displeasure" at Diem's actions and to create uncertainty in his mind as to American intentions. Kennedy hoped that this would prod Diem into acting more leniently. Diem was overthrown in a coupe by the South Vietnamese military on November 1st, , and executed the next day, only three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd later that same month.

Yes, but the quote is misleadingly taken out of context to further the suggestion that Lyndon Johnson was a warmonger. Stone got this quote from Stanley Karnow's book Vietnam: A History [] , and the author has suggested that the line was indeed said during a late White House reception to Joint Chiefs of Staff. But, the author claims that this was an example of LBJ giving different promises to different factions; LBJ was hoping to placate the brass so he could rally their conservative allies on Capitol Hill behind his liberal social agenda.

At the same time, according to author Stanley Karnow, LBJ was also suggesting to members of Congress who were hesitant about Vietnam that he had no intention of getting immersed in that "damn piss-ant little country". Oliver Stone, in order to portray LBJ as a Southern-bred, drawling warmonger, lifted the quote out of context. During the final court trail, Garrison says of a man who had a seizure in Dealey Plaza: "The epileptic later vanished, never checking into the hospital".

Well, he did not exactly "vanish" as Stone says, but was located by the FBI on March 26th, , where he identified himself as Jerry Belknap, an epileptic who had suffered seizures since childhood. He was actually taken to the Parkland Hospital after the seizure but left without registering because he felt better after being given a glass of water and an aspirin.

Also, he realized his chances of seeing a doctor were slim after seeing the President's motorcade pull into the hospital. In the movie, Garrison says the man pumping the umbrella during the motorcade is actually signaling the shooters to "keep shooting" "He's not dead.

Keep shooting. This so-called "umbrella man", as he is known among the conspiracy theorist community, was identified by the House Select Committee for assassinations in as Louie Steven Witt. When questioned by the committee as to why he had an umbrella with him, he said he bought it along to heckle the President's motorcade.

Witt had heard that the umbrella was a "sore spot" with the Kennedy family and he used it as a right wing protest against what he perceived as Kennedy's "softness" on Communism. At the time, cartoonists had often portrayed Britain being shielded by Chamberlain's trademark umbrella.

He had encouraged Chamberlain's efforts, and was thus accused of being a Hitler appeaser; Lyndon Johnson once called Joe Kennedy "a Chamberlain umbrella man". So, it was not a sinister cue as portrayed in the film, but a political gesture intended to irk the President.

None of this is revealed in the film. It also seems unlikely that a professional assassination team would use a man standing in plain view and doing something as odd as repeatedly opening and closing an umbrella on a sunny day as a secret signal. The assassin s would also have a much better vantage point with which to determine Kennedy's condition than someone standing along the parade route, and using the umbrella as a signal would require another member of the shooting team to watch Witt and wait for his signal.

As such, he was one of the people who benefited most directly from President Kennedy's murder. Since most conspiracy theories involve some sort of government collusion in Kennedy's assassination, they require a high-placed government official to be behind them, and LBJ would fit the bill since he had the most to gain.

Also, most conspiracy theories posit the desire of the "military industrial complex" to escalate the Vietnam War as being the motive behind the assassination. For members of the anti-war movement at the time, Johnson became something of a villain, as expressed in the chant "Hey Hey LBJ, how man kids did you kill today!

JFK was a young, handsome, and charming playboy. A political moderate, JFK flirted with issues like Civil Rights but took little radical action during his times.

After his death, a lot of people remembered his administration fondly and many people were able to attribute whatever ideas they wanted to JFK. For many people, including conspiracy theorists, this included the idea that JFK would have gotten us out of Vietnam. At the time of Kennedy's death, Vietnam was just one front in the US war against communism and not that important to the American public.

A few years later, Vietnam had become the biggest foreign policy issue for the country and had provoked massive public protests. In this atmosphere, it was comforting for many to think that Kennedy, the martyred President, would have removed US forces. In contrast, LBJ was a much more prickly personality. He was famous in the Senate for browbeating people into submission. As an old school Southern politician, Johnson was often more comfortable with the nuts and bolts of politics than with the high flying symbolism of the Kennedy era.

At the same time, Johnson had a much more radical agenda than Kennedy did. His Great Society and Civil Rights programs sought major changes in American society and provoked significant discord from those who disapproved of them. In addition, Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam, a decision which ultimately doomed his administration when the war became unpopular with the country at large. Conspiracy theorists generally claim that some or all of the shots that hit JFK, particularly the fatal shot, came from the grassy knoll.

This is seen in the courtroom scene where Garrison demonstrates JFK's head going "back and to the left". There is a photo, dubbed "Badge Man" which conspiracy theorists claim shows a faint image of a man behind the fence of the grassy knoll.

The man appears to have a bright patch on his chest, like a badge hence the name and has a white blob obscuring part of his face. Conspiracy theorists claim that this image is of a man in some kind of law enforcement uniform shooting a gun at JFK and that the white blob is smoke from the gunshot.

However, when Stone went to film the scene he was unable to find a gun from the time which would produce enough visible smoke to show up on camera. So he had a production staffer blow smoke from a bellows to simulate it.

The Warren Commission postulates that there were three shots fired at Kennedy that day. The first shot missed entirely on the Zapruder, film you can see some people seem to react to something unseen at one point and some suggest that this is people reacting to the first gunshot. The third shot was a head shot which killed Kennedy. Conspiracy theorists, who generally believe that more than three shots were fired, derisively labeled the idea the "magic bullet theory" out of a belief that no one shot could have caused the multiple wounds to the two men.

We see Garrison demonstrating the conspiracy theorist's claims in the courtroom scene. In this scene, Garrison describes a bullet which would have to zig-zag in seemingly impossible ways in order to create all the wounds.

Conspiracy theorists claim that this unlikely trajectory proves that the wounds were created by more than one bullet and thus that there was more than one shooter.

However, the conspiracy theorist's view of the "magic bullet" relies on improper positioning of the two men. The scene in the courtroom shows how conspiracy theorists generally align Kennedy and Connally in describing the bullet's trajectory.

In that scene, the two men are both seated at the same level and are directly in front of each other and facing forward. However, this is not how the two men were sitting when they were shot. Connally was sitting in a jump seat in the limo. As such he was somewhat towards the interior of the car and significantly lower than Kennedy was.

If you look at the Zapruder film you can see how low Connally is sitting as he appears shorter than Kennedy when in fact he was the taller man. In addition, Connally had begun to turn slightly by the time of the second shot, perhaps reacting to the sound of the first one.

If you align the men in their proper position then it is entirely plausible that their wounds could have been created by one bullet. In addition, in , the PBS program Nova hired a pair of ballistics experts who reconstructed the path of the bullet from Kennedy's position that day to where the shooter might have been.

Their reconstruction resulted in a zone of possible origins centered on the sixth floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository where Oswald's sniper's next was found. X criticizes the Secret Service for what he characterizes as unusually lax security on Kennedy's motorcade route. He asserts that normal secret service policy was relaxed allowing the assassination to occur.

In particular, he criticizes the people watching from windows and the lack of a "bubble top" on the Presidential limousine. While the Secret Service may have made some mistakes, the idea of airtight Presidential security which X puts forth, or of a nefarious conspiracy to leave Kennedy unguarded, is false. Aside from keeping the President imprisoned in the White House there can be no airtight Presidential security. Any time the President goes out in public he is potentially vulnerable.

The Secret Service takes efforts to reduce his vulnerability but this is not perfect. Indeed, Kennedy himself commented presciently that there was very little the Secret Service could do to protect him from a determined assassin with a gun. The Secret Service simply cannot search every person at a public event. Indeed, even after the Kennedy assassination there were two cases where would be assassins were able to get close to Presidents and fire guns at them.

With regards to X's specific accusations, the route was chosen by the White House, not by the Secret Service. Contrary to X's assertion, the large number of windows along the route was not viewed as a liability and was not the result of a conspiracy looking to provide vantage points for assassinations.

Rather the White House viewed the large number of buildings with a view of the route as a benefit. These buildings allowed more people to be able to see the Presidential motorcade as it passed. The entire point of the motorcade was to cultivate goodwill by allowing people to see the President. X also criticizes the secret service for not using the "bubble top". This was a clear plastic roof that could be attached to the limousine when the normal roof was retracted.

However, the bubble top was never meant to protect the President from gunfire. Instead it was meant to protect him from the weather, such as rain. Since it was a sunny day on November 22nd, there was no reason to use the bubble top, and since it was not designed to be bullet proof, there's no evidence that it would have protected Kennedy even if it had been used.

Stone created a Director's Cut in favor of a home-cinema version, which contained over 16 minutes of new footage adding up to the already over three-hour lasting movie of the theatrical screening.

As is the case with the entire film, the new scenes are obviously full of dialogues. A few of the contacts of Lee Harvey Oswald's past are introduced more thoroughly in the Director's Cut which thus reasonably deepens the background information.

This can also be said of the team of agent Jim Garrison, as here, among other things, the tensions between Bill and Lou along with the corruption of the former become a lot more intelligible. Moreover, Jim appears in the public for one time and extensive interrogations of witnesses can be seen.

Eventually, the text box before the closing credits is worth mentioning: It points out the impact of the theatrical screening which logically was not possible to show within the cinema version itself. Alongside with these extensions, rather unobtrusive alternative footage has often been used at extended passages, such as varying takes which trigger new scenes in the first place.

One scene has been shifted in a slightly changed form for about a few minutes. What could theoretically be regarded as editing, too, are the two witness interviews and one scene set in a telephone booth whereas the Director's Cut shows this scene explicitly, the theatrical screening contains it only at different passages in form of short establishing shots. Oswald qualified as a sharpshooter in the US Marine Corps. Oswald's wife Marina testified that prior to the assassination, she had found her husband practicing firing the rifle he used in the assassination on the porch of their house.

Oswald was dry firing, i. She also believes that prior to the attempt on the life of General Walker, that Oswald had been practicing firing the rifle in the woods. But people liked the movie. As a movie-movie, it worked. But it was also surrounded by questions about its factuality. Several streaming services passed on distributing the film in part over their fact checks.

In Cannes, the film has set up international releases in several countries and is seeking a U. The documentary, which has been edited down to around two hours after being twice that, makes no declarations about who killed Kennedy. The nuclear test ban treaty had been signed. He was an anti-colonialist. Kennedy as Self archive footage. Lee Harvey Oswald as Self archive footage. Brian Tallerico November 12, Now streaming on:. Powered by JustWatch. Now playing.

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