Oswald's Ghost: The Mortal Wound in the Body Politic An interview with Robert Stone, director of Oswald’s Ghost
By Jay Blotcher

The bullets that were €red into Dallas’s Dealey Plaza on a sunny autumn morning in 1963 did more than wound Governor John Connolly and scatter JFK’s grey matter across the street. According to Oscar-nominated local €lm maker Robert Stone, the three shots did further damage: they altered the landscape of American politics for generations to come.

In his new documentary Oswald’s Ghost—a bold, penetrating, and even poetic meditation at a compact 83 minutes—Stone explains how the lone gunman’s act has been subsumed by a fabled, ever-mutable conspiracy theory that includes among its perpetrators the CIA, The Ma€ a, Soviet Russian Communists and Fidel Castro.

Stone brings together key reporters, historians and authors, each who argues the identity of the person or persons who pulled the trigger (witnesses include Tom Hayden, Gary Hart, Dan Rather, and assassination authors Norman Mailer, Robert Dallek, Josiah Thompson, Mark Lane, Edward Jay Epstein and Priscilla Johnson McMillan, the latter a journalist who knew both Kennedy and Oswald.) The bracing debate is leavened immensely by archival photos, audiotape and footage, much that has never been seen before and is, in digitized form for crystal-clarity, newly haunting. But the director, whose last mainstream feature was 2004’s Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, remains a tireless nonpartisan observer of the American zeitgeist. He is less interested in where we were on November 22 than where we headed afterwards. The answer, he tells us with neither mercy nor joy, is that the assassination of our thirty-€fth president claimed two other casualties: the American Left and our collective faith in American politics.

Stone’s timing is fortuitous; Vincent Bugliosi has just released a 1612-page examination of the Kennedy shooting, called Reclaiming History. Oswald’s Ghost will have its United States premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival in October, followed by a national theatre release and a PBS airing in January 2008.

This interview was conducted in mid-July at Robert Stone’s Rhinebeck production of€ces, where he is working on a new documentary about the American ecology movement. This interview was conducted by ROLL Arts writer Jay Blotcher. ROLL: Were you a gun for hire on this project?

ROBERT STONE: No; I’ve wanted to make this €lm for 15 years. I’ve never been a gun for hire.

ROLL: If it’s been in gestation for 15 years, explain the genesis of it.

ROBERT STONE: In the early 90’s, I was commissioned to do a € lm installation at the John Kennedy Presidential Library. A permanent installation. It’s still there—22 €lms in the life of Kennedy, (with)Kennedy telling his own story. We had a huge budget and total access to footage. And right around the time that we were making this, Oliver Stone’s JFK came out, and it was just incredible to witness this explosion of interest in the Kennedy assassination, and Kennedy, all these years later. So I started delving... just expanding out from what I was commissioned to do. And I found all this stuff about people talking about the assassination through the 60’s... that nobody had ever looked at before, seen or cared about. I saw the stuff about [New Orleans attorney Jim] Garrison, which is what Oliver Stone’s €lm was about. And it occurred to me that nobody had ever done a €lm about the assassination as a social phenomenon.

ROLL: Elaborate on the charge that the assassination ultimately undermined the agenda and credibility of the American political left.

ROBERT STONE: It started when Oswald was arrested and it was demonstrated that he was a Communist, and he had gone to Russia and all that kind of stuff. And this [assassination] taking place in Dallas, which was a hotbed of right-wing extremism. Many people on the left just couldn’t get their head around that. We’re coming out of the 1950s and the whole McCarthy era is pretty fresh in people’s minds, and the idea that a leftist had gone and shot John F. Kennedy was appalling. And it just seemed like a setup. Now Mark Lane [attorney for Oswald’s mother Marguerite] was a Socialist, certainly. He had worked for the offshoot of the Daily Worker [Communist newspaper]. He had worked for the only elected Socialist congressman. He was of that thing. Many people around him that started the idea that there was a bigger plot—a right-wing plot to blame the left—were from that political persuasion. This idea became adopted by a larger portion of the American public (not just the left, but predominantely by the left) and was very, very prevalent by student activists, the youth movement and the counterculture of that time. You even ask today if Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman or was it a conspiracy, and it’s like duh, of course it was a conspiracy. You take it for granted. That, compounded, by the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, drove a lot of people out of engaging in the political process.

ROLL: When did your research on this documentary begin?

ROBERT STONE: I had collected a bunch of stuff just in the course of doing this other project in the early 90's. I had sold my € lm Guerilla to [PBS’s] American Experience, and they were thrilled with that and asked me if I wanted to do another €lm for them. I said, well, this is something I always wanted to do. And Mark Samels, the exec producer there, who’s a huge fan of mine, said, “This sounds great; you got the connection to 9/11” and they backed it to the hilt. Also Nick Frazier at the BBC. Nick was actually the €rst person I approached. He got it. It was the quickest pitch I ever gave: half a sentence.

ROLL: Did the British media examine the assassination differently from US media?

ROBERT STONE: No, I think it’s actually quite similar: you had the establishment media basically supporting the Warren Commission and you had everybody else trashing it. Look
- it’s one of those things. If you say you agree with the Warren Commission, you sound dumb. Like, Oh, you’ll believe anything anybody tells you. You say you believe in a conspiracy, it makes you feel kind of smart: I’m a free-thinking individual; I come to my own conclusions about stuff. There’s that. Well, in fact, the reality is that if you ask most people, their only source of information about the assassination has come from conspiracy theories. So, the idea that people come to their own conclusions about these kind of things is not true. But it does make you sound like a dimwit if you say, well, I believe the Warren Commission... all the physics [about Oswald being the lone gunman} have been hashed over and gone through. It’s a theological debate at this point,(...)this is a prime example of faith-based reasoning, where you’ll € nd facts that €t the preordained conclusion. Truth matters. History matters. We went to war recently because 75% of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11. And to this day, 60% of the American people still believe that. So, this... is not just an abstract thing that doesn’t really matter. It does matter because it frames people’s perspective about other things in life. When George Bush lies to the American public about going to war, that just simply exacerbates people’s total mistrust of any kind of rational thinking. Because I think there is a natural inclination to want to trust the government, and when they lie to you, it’s almost like your parents lie to you.

ROLL: The erosion has continued?

ROBERT STONE: Yes, the erosion of faith. The erosion of trust. Therefore, it’s all free game. You go on the Internet, you tune into your own favorite blog by people who are giving you the kind of information that support your preordained views of the world. And that’s [everybody] in their own bubbles, living in their own little realities, and that has an impact... I am treading on very, very sensitive ground here. A lot of people who I deeply respect —most of my friends—are absolutely convinced that there’s a conspiracy. They’re not stupid people. So I don’t want to get into the position of saying, anybody who believes this is stupid. Quite the opposite. I bent over backwards to say: Well, I don’t believe this [conspiracy theory,] but I can understand why you believe it, and I want to explain to you the history of this belief.