ABSTRACT
At a critical moment in Oliver Stone’s JFK, Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) travels to Washington DC to meet Mr. X (Donald Sutherland), a shadowy former figure in the government’s intelligence community, hoping to gather more evidence to strengthen his fragile case for uncovering the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.1 Garrison has been stymied by multiple sources while preparing his case to prosecute Clay Shaw/Bertram (Tommy Lee Jones), a local New Orleans businessman whom he believes is the link that will unravel the complex web of people and organizations involved in the plot to kill the president. During his meeting with Mr. X, however, Garrison discovers that his pursuit of justice in a provincial New Orleans case has actually drawn him into a much more corrupt and sinister conspiracy that includes intelligence agencies, major military leaders, and President Johnson. While searching for a small nugget of evidence to convict Shaw, Garrison instead receives a conspiracy narrative from Mr. X that implicates the current president in the Kennedy assassination. As Garrison listens in astonishment, Mr. X unravels a gargantuan conspiracy theory that indicts (nay, convicts) national leaders for conspiring to assassinate the former president as part of a coup d’état to install Johnson as president and escalate American involvement in Vietnam. Having heard Mr. X’s revelations, Garrison is no longer a mere provincial attorney. Exposed to the “truth” behind the Kennedy assassination, he becomes the iconic, betrayed American who accepts what was once considered unthinkable: that the US government will murder and lie at will in order to advance its interests. To this point in the film, the narrative has privileged Garrison’s noble, if naive pursuit to expose the conspiracy, wanting us to sympathize with his quixotic prosecution. But in this film sequence, the film requires that we adopt his perspective. We observe Garrison visiting historic memorials of slain leaders in the national capital, with an especially evocative camera shot of him
at Kennedy’s gravestone. As Garrison looks longingly at the memorial and its eternal flame, we watch an African American father and his daughter pay homage to Kennedy’s memory.2 Clearly, this scene provokes us to remember Kennedy’s short tenure as president and the ways he inspired Americans to greatness, including advancing black civil rights (although historically this is questionable). In feeling Garrison’s pathos, we too listen to Mr. X’s recounting of events, and it is we who also feel betrayed by our government for shattering our American innocence.
