Oswald's Ghost

That is about the extent of this film's contribution. If you think Todd Gitlin, or Tom Hayden know beans about any of this, their participation will disabuse you of that notion. And if you have forgotten how Mark Lane got rich off his speculations on the assassination, here is a reminder.

If you think polling a subset of less than 2% of the US population is key to understanding an issue in which Stone tells us more than 70% of the US population is united in having no faith in the Warren Report, you will love the wacky logic of OSWALD'S GHOST.

A LOT of opinion and very few facts. I find the musings of an Mailer on his last legs interesting because I find Mailer's thought processes interesting, but he adds nothing to the issues here either. One might as well hear yet another actor tells you what he/she "thinks" about politics. They do better when someone writes their lines.

The objective of this documentary is to show how "dark revanchist forces" (AKA Republicans, generals, intelligence folks, corporate types etc), as opposed to the good old-time lefty Marxist doctrine, resorted to assassination in the cases of JFK, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and the like to hold back "the future." If you have somehow missed out of on the many "documentary" efforts of film makers like Stone to get this point across, here is another chance.

Case in point, it is useful to have Edward Jay Epstein's send up of Garrison's numerological idiocies, but whatever viewers think about "who dun it," and we have a lot of evidence here on IMDb that there are a lot of opinions about that, Stone intentionally ignores the hardest evidence of what really counts right under his nose.

The key point is that there is no evidence as yet that ANY single assassin can have pulled off the JFK assassination... Oswald or anyone else. Trying to aim and fire all those shots and make two hits with a piece of crap like a Carcano bolt action with that scope... just hasn't worked.

Any fair minded analyst must concede THAT makes a lot of difference to evaluating a film like OSWALD'S GHOST which is more agitprop than Doc.

EVERY attempt to duplicate the marksmanship required of the "one assassin in six seconds" theory over the past 40 years has failed. One of the most detailed attempts to duplicate it was put together by CBS News a few years after the assassination. Stone carries a few feet of film showing the test underway. But Stone never tells us that CBS couldn't duplicate it either.

It does matter. Stone is just another tourist, putting together his idea of pretty faces that the PBS PC will find acceptable and same-old same-old commentary with no context and no understanding of what he is dealing with. Hey, they paid him and ran it.

Too bad that was enough for him

This film has great production values and footage, but all it does is gloss up another lame attempt to paint conspiracy buffs as paranoid losers blind to the evil machinations of one Lee Harvey Oswald. We all know we'll never know the truth, but the flawed logic applied in these 'documentaries' always baffles me. A second shooter means a controversy, right? Isn't the second shooter Jack Ruby? He was stalking the Dallas Police station all weekend, but Stone wants us to believe his shooting of Oswald was spontaneous and proves it by showing how close he cut his appointment with destiny at the Western Union? Give me a break. Nuts who claim JFK was shot by his driver or that Tippett was the shooter on the Grassy Knoll don't help...but in the end people just need to rely on what can be seen, and that's that there is no way Oswald pulled this off alone on any level. End of story.

Of course this is better than the reenactment of a few years back that 'proved' the magic bullet theory and then concluded that it eliminated discussion of a conspiracy. You know, without ever addressing the head shot(s). Ever.

Wake me up when someone without an agenda produces something new.

I was in the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper's library when I heard the news of Kennedy's assassination. Thus began a great mystery in the U.S. and around the world that continues to this day. Trillions of words and thousands of books have been written about the assassination, and that alone tells us that there is no one satisfactory theory about why or how Kennedy was murdered.

Robert Stone's documentary is both odd and disjointed. As someone else on this board has already noted, director Stone starts off with a reasonably balanced view of the assassination, leads us through various conspiracy theories and talking heads, and then, boom, just like that, in the final 10 minutes, allows noted author Norman Mailer to wrap it up for us: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Mailer offers his 'evidence' more from a novelist's point of view than from one of evidence. Mailer's 'proof': Oswald was living in desperate straits, he was frustrated but bright and articulate, he had delusions of grandeur, he wanted a permanent place in American history, he worked in a building on the parade route, and voila: it all came together.

Director Stone ends his movie focused on Mailer's fanciful artistic interpretation of events (Oswald's ghost knows the answers, but a ghost will not tell us). It's quizzical to say the least.

Mailer (and ultimately filmmaker Stone himself) leaves out a glaring contradiction that still stares at conspiracy theorists today. It's a glaring contradiction not wrapped in Maileresque language: the famous Zapruder film (now digitalized for even more vivid inspection), which clearly shows that Kennedy had the top of his head blown off by a shot from the FRONT, not from the Texas Schoolbook Depository in the rear, where Lee Harvey Oswald was purportedly firing three shots in six seconds.

It is peculiar that Mailer, Stone, Elliott Jay Epstein (author of a book on the murder), former student radical-activist Todd Gatlin, and disgraced former Senator Gary Hart have all attached themselves to the 'single gunman' theory. Oswald may well have been involved up to his skinny little neck, but it still doesn't explain Zapruder's remarkable film, which has nothing to do with Oswald the Man, but merely frightening evidence that something else was happening on that fateful day in November 1963. That 'something else' has never been explained, and this film basically ignores it.

This film ultimately leaves the viewer with more questions than answers. Exactly what we needed: even more questions about the Kennedy assassination.

'Oswald's Ghost' left me with this uncomfortable feeling that too many people are desperate to put this whole messy business behind us. It is, after all, much easier, and much neater, to blame it all on a single shooter who also happened to be crazy.

It's impossible to review this film without having a bias. I do believe a conspiracy was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy but, as always when dealing with these matters, I do keep an open mind. While the film ostensibly is not on the whodunit but that question has done to us, Oswald's Ghost has a definite bias in it. And that bias is what kills the film.

Director Robert Stone seems to have done his homework. His interviews cover many proponents of both sides of the argument. He also goes a step further to present unseen or rarely seen / heard materials including news clips and the actual Dallas police recordings. Stone also chooses to employ some interesting visual techniques in the film as well. For example there is the whirlpool of Oswald and Warren Commission images at the start of the film, the (apparent) black hole of conspiracy books, and the positive / negative effect on stock footage during the playing of the recording of Perry Russo's sodium pentothal questioning. These are all well done, but their use in Stone's context is questionable.

Thus the film's fault lies in its bias. Stone seems convinced that the mystery is solved and has been for nearly forty-five years. The film then proceeds to essentially say that independent researchers (that is to say conspiracy theorists) have led the public on a wild goose chase of truly epic proportions. Stone seems to use the film and virtually every frame to saying this. Stone's film is not just, as he claims, a study of the effect of a mystery on the public. For the most part the film feels like an indictment of those who dare not agree with his point of view.

Would the film have been better without this bias? That's hard to say, really. I suspect that one's own opinion on the topic determines how one interprets the film. While one can argue over the factuality of the film, it is visually striking in its presentation as if to shock and awe. Does it succeed in that aim? I'll leave you to be the judge

Oswald's Ghost is far from a critical expose on the assassination, as Oliver Stone's JFK was. The very fact that Oswald's Ghost's director has the same last name as Oliver to direct the film, says volumes about the intelligence community's ( and the mainstream media's ) agenda to confuse future generations.

The fact that classic dissemblers, like Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Dan Rather and J. Edward Epstein are given leading roles in the film, is the strongest indictment against the film. That Norman Mailer is given so much time in the film as well( and the last word ), makes me want to catalog the in the "Propaganda/Fiction Department Section, along with The Warren Report, and other books. The PBS and American Experience staff should all be ashamed of themselves for perpetuating the lies about the assassination.

The only honest criticism given in the film are given by Tom Hayden, Josiah Thompson and Todd Getlin, but neither three give any real facts from the critical literature to educate the viewer.

Hugh Aynesworth, a Dallas/Fortworth journalist who covered the assassination at the time and who comments on the Warren Report, spouts the official version, that Oswald acted alone. Aynesworth tells us a white lie when he says that he interviewed one witness who watched Oswald shoot from the sixth floor window of the Texas school depository Building. He may have interviewed witnesses that day, or sometime later, but no witnesses positively identified Lee Harvey Oswald in that window that day. Aynesworth's words, simply, can't be taken for granted.

Robert Dallek, who also given prime time in the film, was one of the historian researchers who worked for The Assassination records and Review Bord ( ARRB )in the nineties. That board was created and pushed through Congress by President Herbert Walker Bush in 1991 as a last ditch effort to foist, literally, tons of heavily redacted ( and forged ) declassified Secret CIA, FBI, ONI ( Naval Intelligence) documents into the American public's lap. So much for Dallek's hidden agenda, as well.

J. Edward Epstein, another spokesman in the film for the "we'll never know the truth about the assassination "theory, wrote some good books on the assassination, but he was Army Intelligence, so we can't trust him, either.

Mark Lane, who wrote one of the very first critiques on the Warren commission Report's findings, Rush to Judgment, the film's only honest critic of the warren Commission Report, but he is overrided by the film's general dishonesty.

Dan Rather, another journalist who speaks in the film is also dissembling. He was in Dallas that fateful day, as a cub reporter for CBS. Rather was one of the very first to see the Zapruder film, and he caved-in, changed his story, and sold his soul to the devil. Rather originally said that the President's head "fell backwards and to the left", which coincides with a shot from the front. Then he changed his tune to: "the President's head fell forwards and to the left", to go along with the warren Commission's magic bullet single lone nut theory. I have the two copies of Life magazine from January 1964, both printed on the same day. The first one, with Dan Rather's first line was pulled off of the press, and the second censored edition that was officially released, with Rather's changed tune is the one that the American Public got.

That Priscilla Johnson shamelessly shows her face again on the assassination subject doesn't surprise me at all. She was one of the very first intelligence assets to disseminate mis and disinformation, with lies to the Warren Commission and to the American public( with her book, Marina and Lee ).

I attended the ARRB's venued event when it came to Boston in the early nineties and convened at the State House on Beacon Hill. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who is also given prime time in Oswald's Ghost was invited by the Review Board to testify. The first question that the Board asked Priscilla was whether she had ever been approached by the CIA. Priscilla never did answer that question, but instead,dissembled for a good twenty minutes or half hour and in so many words or less, basically told the panel and the audience that if anyone wanted to know who really killed John F. Kennedy, they should go to Russia and dig-up frozen KGB colonels, and ask the. In the film, Priscilla tells us that if Kennedy were alive today, that he'd be as puzzled as all of us are ( not me! ) as to who killed him and why. I have seen McMillan's CIA 201 file that has her checked-ff as a "witting asset". So much for her testimonial in the film.

Norman Mailer is given way too much time ( and the last word ) in the film. He says that he spent twenty-five years studying the assassination, and then he admits that he as an amateur. From what he tells us in the film, it is obvious that he didn't read enough of the critical literature. Of course, he was a friend of Priscilla Johnson McMillan's, which says a lot. In his book, Oswald's Tale, Mailer leads his readers by the nose and after eight hundred and something pages, tells them that Oswald killed Kennedy because Marina didn't give him ( Oswald, not Kennedy ) enough sex. Mailer should have titled his book, Oswald's Tail ( two puns intended ). puns intended ). Mailer can be thus dismissed as either an unwitting fool, or a witting stooge.

Basicaly, Oswald's Ghost is a total waste of time.

Bruno Hrvat