Two of the greatest speeches ever delivered by an American president bookend this extraordinary documentary film. It opens with President John F. Kennedy giving the commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963 and it closes with his civil rights speech to the American people the following day.
It is a deft artistic touch that suggests the brevity of JFK’s heroic efforts for world peace and domestic racial equality and justice before he was assassinated in a public execution in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
In the former anti-war speech, he called for the end to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the halt to the arms race, and the abolishment of war and its weapons, especially nuclear. He said:
What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
In the latter address to the American people, having just sent National Guard troops to the University of Alabama to make sure two black students were admitted despite the racist objections of Governor George Wallace, his words transcended the immediate issue at the university and called for the end to the immoral and illegal discrimination against African Americans in every area of the nation’s life.
He said:
One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.
Having framed the documentary thus, Oliver Stone and the screenwriter James DiEugenio do a masterful job of explaining what really happened in the years of Kennedy’s short presidency, why he was such a great threat to the CIA and the military-industrial complex, what really happened when they killed him, and how the Warren Commission, the CIA, and the corporate media have worked hand-in-hand to this day to cover up the truth.
The current two-hour version of JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass will be followed in a month or so by a more detailed four-hour version.
The importance of this film is twofold: It establishes an updated historical record since the Assassination Records Review Board (AARB) was established as a result of Stone’s 1991 breakthrough film, JFK, which forced the release of previously hidden documents, and, more importantly, it emphatically shows why JFK’s assassination is crucial for understanding the United States today.
For without a clear and unambiguous accounting of why he was killed and by whom (I do not mean the actual shooters), and who in the government and media has covered it up, we are doomed to repeat the past as this country has been doing ever since.
Because JFK Revisited assiduously documents the essential claims of Stone’s 1991 film and adds to it with the latest factual material released since the ARRB required the release of the previously secret documents, the film, like the JFK film before it, will be denounced by the same media/intelligence forces that slammed the earlier movie.
Back then the bogus critiques claimed Stone’s imagination had gone wild and he distorted history, so now the best way for those critics to rip this evidence-filled documentary is to omit mentioning its contents and to continue calling him a conspiracy-obsessed guy still intent on promoting his fantasies.
Once it was his “fictions” that were ridiculous; now it is his facts, despite his research colleague and screenwriter James DiEugenio’s exhaustive confirmation of the facts that will be released later this year when the annotated script is published.
JFK Revisited proves with facts that Stone was right in 1991. Even then, but little known, is that JFK was also accompanied by a book of the film that included copious research notes. But facts don’t seem to matter to Stone’s critics, then or now. They are too damning.
So let’s examine the documentary.
It opens with Kennedy speaking at American University and quickly switches to a montage of condensed news reports of the shooting in Dallas.
Kennedy’s death, people’s reactions, Oswald’s arrest, his claim that he’s a “patsy,” Ruby’s killing of Oswald, JFK’s funeral, reports that Kennedy was shot from the front and the rear, the formation of the Warren Commission and the naming of its members, including most significantly the former Director of the CIA Allen Dulles whom Kennedy had fired, the Commission’s finding that Oswald alone killed the president, that there was no conspiracy, the Zapruder film, and NBC’s Chet Huntley saying that the assassination is thoroughly documented (in the Warren Commission Report) and it’s all there for anyone who would like to pursue it.
Huntley’s ironically false statement is followed by a jump cut to Oliver Stone in Dealey Plaza telling how it wasn’t all there at all, that The Warren Report was a sham, and how in the intervening years plenty of new information and evidence has been revealed by the Church Commission Hearings in 1975 that uncovered the CIA and FBI’s machinations in assassination plots at home and abroad; followed a decade later by the public showing of the Zapruder film and the subsequent House Select Committee on Assassinations’ (HSCA) finding that there was probably a conspiracy in Kennedy’s murder.
Although the Warren Report came under questioning during these years, the HSCA sealed half a million “dangerous records” until 2029. But as a result of Stone’s JFK film in 1991, the government was pressured to pass The John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act with its Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).
The ARRB ordered the release of the secret documents within four years. Over two million pages were released and they are housed at the National Archives, although certain documents are still being withheld.
One could argue that the truth about the assassination was obvious from the start and that only elements within the U.S. government could have carried out this crime and covered it up.
That only simple logic was needed to solve the crime because from the start the Warren Commission made no sense with its magic bullet explanation, and that only national security operatives could have withdrawn the president’s security protection, etc. That new documents are not needed. That arguing any of this is just a pseudo-debate and a waste of time.
There is cogency to that argument, but Stone prefers to take a different route and use the released records to bolster his argument and establish a cinematic record for future generations. He is making accessible in a two-hour movie a powerful historical lesson that should be seen by everyone; it is one absent from the history books students read in school.
That his enemies will try to dissuade the public from viewing the film is not surprising, for doing so with the supporting testimonies of so many experts and the presentation of the suppressed official documents make these critics look like fools, or simply the tools they are.
For while this film relies on many documents forced out of the government’s own vaults and therefore hoists the critics with their own petard, it is also a reminder that the media is deeply infiltrated with CIA plants and assets, as has been shown by the revelations of Operation Mockingbird, a program that surely never ended but has only intensified today’s propaganda.
One glance at the headlines of reviews of this film since its release two months ago reveals the vituperative personal nature of the attacks on Stone, showing that the film’s evidentiary content is of no interest to the reviewers. Ad hominem attacks will suffice.
Even the one review I read previous to writing this – sent to me by someone who considered it to be positive – was a sly piece of disinformation disguised as praise. The enemies of truth are not just vulgar morons but very sophisticated tricksters.
Let me break down the evidence presented in the film in order of appearance:
- First, the so-called three bullets and the magic bullet.
- Second, the alleged rifle and new evidence confirming that Lee Oswald was not on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
- Third, the autopsy, its faked photographs, and the pressure placed on the Parkland Hospital doctors to change what they saw with their own eyes.
- Fourth, Oswald’s history working with the CIA and FBI, his fake defection to the Soviet Union, the coverup of the intelligence agencies’ use of Oswald from start to finish, and the other plots to assassinate Kennedy in Chicago and Tampa that follow the same template as Oswald in Dallas.
- Fifth, why Kennedy was murdered.
None of these issues are analyzed in some half-assed theoretical way, but are supported by documentary facts – evidence, in other words. As Stone says, “Conspiracy theories are now conspiracy facts.”
Nevertheless, those writers whose review headlines I mentioned prefer to call Stone “looney,” a “conspiracy quack,” etc. as they ignore the facts, new and old.
Hellbound and Down 
