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JFK was deemed controversial in its conspiratorial speculation about the Kennedy assassination, but his main purpose should be clear to anyone who has followed Oliver Stone's career as filmmaker, as the director attempts to answer the question: "Why were we in Vietnam?" Stone begins his film with archive footage of Dwight David Eisenhower's warning to the nation to beware of the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower feared might become powerful enough to dictate policy.

As usual, the best films of 1991 clustered in mid-to-late December, ranging from the silly to the serious, from Disney's dancing teapots and Robin Williams's Peter Pan in Steven Spielberg's expensively overproduced Hook to Warren Beatty's Bugsy (which dazzled the Los Angeles Film Critics, who proclaimed it the Best Film of 1991) to Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (which should have dazzled the critics with its technique and its inventive use of Shakespeare's play) and, in an escalating progression of seriousness, to Oliver Stone's thoughtful, dynamic and challenging JFK, probably the year's most important film.

JFK was deemed controversial in its conspiratorial speculation about the Kennedy assassination, but his main purpose should be clear to anyone who has followed Oliver Stone's career as filmmaker, as the director attempts to answer the question: "Why were we in Vietnam?" Stone begins his film with archive footage of Dwight David Eisenhower's warning to the nation to beware of the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower feared might become powerful enough to dictate policy.

As a consequence, Stone has paid the price that political filmmakers must pay in America when their message runs counter to the Establishment: scorn, ridicule, and contempt. Tom Wicker led the attack in the New York Times (15 December 1991), asking in a rhetorical frame: "Does 'JFK' Conspire Against Reason?" Wicker criticized Stone for treating "matters that are wholly speculative as facts and truth, thus rewriting history." His denunciation was paralleled later in the week by Vincent Canby's review (20 December), headlined "When Everything Amounts to Nothing." On 17 December, Stone was attacked by a piece on the Op-Ed page of the Washington Post, signed by Warren Commission counsel David W. Belin and former President Gerald R. Ford. Were they trying to protect dark State secrets? Oliver Stone replied with a spirited defense of his film in the Washington Post a week later, on 24 December. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times obviously wanted to destroy Oliver Stone's credibility before JFK went into general release. The question is, why? Why was the Establishment so frightened by this movie and its speculations?

JFK looks back to what might be called the crime of the century that occurred in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. Anyone who was alive then will remember that day when the most energetic and youthful President our country had seen since Theodore Roosevelt was cut down in the prime of his life. Kennedy seemed to offer the nation ideals and vision and purpose. He assembled around him, seemingly like Plato's philosopher king, a group of advisors who have since been called "the best and the brightest." He faced down the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Stone links to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He brought more class and culture to the White House than any other President in recent memory. He seemed to be cultured, articulate, well-informed and well-read. In Berlin at the Wall he astonished his audience by addressing them in flawless German: "Ich bin ein Berliner!" He was possessed of a beautiful wife and beautiful children. The legend of "Camelot" attached to his tenure in office. The nation seemed happy, secure, upbeat, and optimistic.

But Kennedy's "New Frontier" was not to last. Instead, we got Lyndon Johnson, the "Great Society," and a protracted, soul-destructive war in Vietnam. By the end of the 1960s the nation was ripped apart by dissent and with Johnson's decision not to run in 1968, the Democrats lost the White House to Richard ("I am not a crook") Nixon, who gave us the legacy of Watergate. Perhaps Kennedy would have done better had he lived. Perhaps he would have had the wisdom not to get embroiled in a civil war in Southeast Asia, at least in the informed opinion of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Perhaps the assassination was politically motivated. The Warren Commission rushed to judgment to convince the nation that Kennedy was assassinated by one lone gunman, so we could get on with the business of waging war. Doubts lingered on, however, about the Warren Commission's "one-man-one-gun" theory. Stone's film shows why people had reason to question the Warren Commission's conclusions. It effectively discredits the "one-man-one-gun" notion and makes the so-called "magic bullet" explanation seem especially ridiculous, regardless of whether one accepts Stone's larger and more general conspiracy theory.

Oliver Stone's skepticism does not represent a peculiar minority opinion. A recent Gallup Poll (quoted by the studio) indicated that 73 percent of those Americans polled did not buy the Warren Commission's Report and believed that there was in fact a conspiracy to kill the President. Stone's screenplay, written with Zachary Sklar, follows two sources, Jim Garrison's On the Trail of the Assassins, and Jim Marrs's Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, concluding that the assassination was a coup d'etat to remove from office a president whom the hawks believed was "soft" on Communism. Lyndon Johnson, one of the most savvy and powerful politicians in the Senate before he became Vice President, was their man to hold the line against the Communists in Southeast Asia. In fact, this is as plausible an explanation as that offered by the Warren Commission. Or is it? Did Lyndon Johnson remark to his biographer: "If we get involved in that bitch of a war my Great Society will be dead?"

If Stone errs, it is in keying his story to Jim Garrison's crusade to prosecute New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for conspiracy in the murder. Those old enough to remember these events will recall that this spectacular sideshow organized by the District Attorney of New Orleans, attempting to link Clay Shaw to Lee Harvey Oswald through middleman David Feme, fizzled out. Many thought that Garrison was exploiting the trauma of the Kennedy assassination to build his own reputation. Stone contends that those responsible for the coup did everything within their power to discredit Garrison, who emerges as the hero of Stone's film.

The casting of Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison helps to raise the stakes and elevate the District Attorney's heroic potential. Tommy Lee Jones plays Clay Shaw as a wealthy, dangerous, powerful, devious homosexual sleaze, and the film generates absolutely no sympathy for him or his lowlife cronies, such as retired FBI agent Guy Bannister (Edward Asner), and, especially, Shaw's henchman David Ferrie (played as a sleazy, pathetic psychopath by Joe Pesci in the most astonishing supporting role of 1991).

Sissy Spacek plays Garrison's wife, who attempts to hold her family together through her husband's ordeal. Gary Oldman (who played Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy) plays Lee Harvey Oswald and seems to be a dead ringer for that loser. The talented supporting cast also includes John Candy, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau (as Senator Russell Long), Donald Sutherland (as Garrison's mysterious Washington informant, known only as "X"), Kevin Bacon, and Garrison himself, ironically playing Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Despite the attempts to discredit the film, JFK was strongly in contention for being the best film of 1991, and was nominated as such by the Motion Picture Academy. There can be absolutely no doubt that it was the most significant film of the year. It is overly long, but it is splendidly made and has a dazzling all-star cast to carry its debatable thesis. What makes it unusual is that, unlike most American movies, it has a thesis, offering an interpretation of one of the most important events in recent American history. Such an interpretation does not necessarily constitute a rewriting of history, as Tom Wicker asserted, but it does force the viewer to think back over a tragic event that surely altered the course of American history during the latter half of our century.

Official Washington was demonstrably upset by Stone's interpretation of history, as evidenced by the number of column inches devoted to the film in the Washington Post. First-line critic Rita Kempley at least gave Stone some credit (20 December): "Another futile attempt to exorcise the nightmare of Vietnam, 'JFK' is Stone's best and most emotional film since 'Platoon.'" In an intemperate ad hominem attack titled "Paranoid History" (26 December), George F. Will criticized the film as a "travesty," an "act of execrable history and contemptible citizenship by a man of technical skill, scant education and negligible conscience." Pat Dowel 1, the Washingtonian magazine film critic, resigned after her editor. Jack Limpert, refused to publish a brief, laudatory review of JFK. As reported by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post (24 January 1992), Dowell wrote: "I cannot in good conscience keep my job at the price of tailoring my evaluation of a film's merits to fit someone else's idea of political (or cinematic) correctness."

Many objected to Stone's mingling fact with fiction. There was, for example, no secret Washington meeting between Jim Garrison and the mysterious "Mr. X" (Donald Sutherland in the film). Reviewing the film for The Guardian in Britain (23 January 1992), Derek Malcolm wrote: "It is almost but not quite history as gossip." Charles Bremner wrote in the London Times Saturday Review ( 18 January): "Until he tackled JFK, Stone was rarely pressed over his argument that artistic licence gave him the right to recast history provided it was done with the intention of sticking to the spiritual truth of his subject." Bremner concluded by quoting Stone from Premiere magazine: "The assassination was America's first coup d'etat and it worked."

In Britain Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who was interviewed, along with Oliver Stone on BBC-I (17 January 1992), noted: "The premise that Kennedy was moving out of Vietnam was defensible; the conclusion that the CIA or the Joint Chiefs or J. Edgar Hoover were involved in a conspiracy is not." Schlesinger objected to the way Stone presents "an extreme hypothesis as literal fact." He conceded that the inquiry was justified, but added that "film is not necessarily the best medium for that inquiry." Well, that would seem to depend on the intended result. Certainly the American networks were soon reviewing the major conspiracy theories, and ultimately, in the wake of the film, the closed files on the assassination were promised to be opened, because of the renewed controversy. How many films have exercised such influence and produced such results?1