John F. Kennedy: “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.” Howie Carr’s column, which was printed on July 4th in The Boston Herald, is a nutty litany of the conservative and politically motivated vendetta that is trotted out every time the reactionaries think: “Hey, things have gotten so bad that the public might be reminded of how much progress was made during the Kennedy presidency.” No president before Kennedy ever confronted the civil rights issue as he did. No one was even close. It was the preceding century of near inertia that created the immense problem that President Kennedy faced in 1961. But to his credit, Kennedy pressed the issue from the outset. Finally, the inspiration and support he gave the civil rights movement, provided the opportunity to pass what Clay Risen has called the “bill of the century”. What JFK achieved in three years is quite remarkable, especially when compared to his White House predecessors (Dwight Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt) in thirty years prior.
In the wake of the sensation caused by the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, scores of books were either released or republished in order to capitalize on that publicity wave. Many of these were utterly worthless, but that did not matter to the MSM. Since Chuck Giancana had a famous last name, he got exposure. Chuck was the half-brother of “Momo” Giancana, the Chicago don. Sam Giancana was his half-nephew and they co-authored the book. Therefore, these two collaborators (Sam and Chuck Giancana) were taken at their word, without any due diligence done by the media or any consultation with experts in the field who could give them such analysis. I had little regard for it when I first read it; I have less for it now. In fact, today, not only do I think it is mythological, I think it is scatological. It has the historical value of a Harold Robbins novel. Double Cross also stated that the Outfit owned the contract of Marilyn Monroe. As the esteemed Don McGovern notes in his book on the subject, this is more bunk. McGovern goes on to demonstrate how Double Cross libels Joe Schenck and Marilyn Monroe about both their personal reputations and professional careers. If that is not goofy enough, the book claims that Giancana had Monroe killed on orders of the CIA and they killed her with a rectal suppository. As McGovern notes, Momo Giancana must have had some great chemist working for him, because the type of suppository described in the book was not invented at the time of Marilyn’s death in 1962. (McGovern, pp. 511-514)
I won’t even go into the issues of why the CIA would want Monroe killed or why, of all people, they would contract that assignment out to Giancana. I will say, though, that when Double Cross came out in 1992, there were multi-segment specials about it on the programs ET and Hard Copy. They accepted the book at virtually face value. Thus is the culture we inhabit. Influenced by the work of his sister Eunice Shriver, one of the first things Robert Kennedy did as attorney general was to take a dual interest in the rights of the poor to have attorneys and also the problems and causes of juvenile delinquency. (Edward R. Schmitt, President of the Other America, p. 68) Other times, David Hackett would show RFK the shabby conditions of schools or recreation areas. The attorney general was moved by these and so he invited celebrities—Cary Grant, Edward R. Murrow—to come into those blighted neighborhoods to give talks to the kids who lived there. (Schmitt, pp. 69-70) The attorney general would also attain appropriations to repair some of these facilities. America was sitting on a ticking time-bomb. While everyone was concentrating on the South, Hackett and Bobby Kennedy were examining sociological predicaments elsewhere that could not be solved by an accommodations bill or a voting rights act. In these places, the problems were not simple and the remedy was not as direct. In fact, RFK predicted that riots would erupt soon if nothing was done. (Schmitt, p. 86) He told a Senate committee in February of 1963 that America was “racing the clock against disaster… We must give the members of this new lost generation some real hope in order to prevent a shattering explosion of social problems in the years to come.”
Needless to say, no other administration had ever gone this far in this specific field. Richard Russell was so worried that he told his colleague Senator Harry Byrd that what he feared if Kennedy got elected was that he would go beyond even the Democratic platform. (Brauer, p. 53) The insight may have originated from Russell’s personal exposure to Kennedy while they were in the Senate. And indeed, that is what the president was doing at the time of his death, before his civil rights bill passed. As the president told Heller at their last meeting on the topic, “Yes, Walter, I am definitely going to have something in the line of an attack on poverty.” (Schmitt, p. 93) To show how interested he was, at his final meeting with his cabinet, President Kennedy mentioned the word “poverty” six times. After his death, Jackie Kennedy took the notes of that meeting to Bobby Kennedy. The attorney general had them framed and put up on his wall. (Schmitt, pp. 92, 96) As Hackett told RFK, the situation America faced in 1962 it was much more complicated than the FDR's New-Deal era. Kennedy was going to face the poverty problem in 1964 in order to transform it into a national issue. He did not plan on starting his program until after the 1964 election. (Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism, p. 71) What happened after his death shows how important one man can be in determining the currents of history. Walter Heller met with Johnson the day after Kennedy’s murder. The economist told the new president about the ideas he and JFK had reviewed for relieving poverty. When Heller got back to him with the demonstration projects that were running under Hackett, Johnson almost eliminated the entire program. The new president understood that the civil rights act making its slow way through Congress was really Kennedy’s.
As I have noted, Clay Risen’s book, The Bill of the Century proves that point. But Kennedy’s poverty program had not been formally announced or written up. Therefore, Johnson could present it as his own. A bit over four months later, Johnson would announce the Great Society. Most analysts have differentiated the Great Society from the War on Poverty. The main agency for the latter was called the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). In five years, from 1965-70, OEO was granted 1.5% of the budget for all of its programs. Needless to say, all this hubbub necessitated that the cautious Hackett be retired to the sidelines. Which he was. While Johnson was putting together his package, David Hackett—the man who ran the program for three years, who knew more about it than anyone—was now working on Bobby Kennedy’s senatorial campaign in New York. RFK tried to intervene to no avail. Hackett wanted what he called his “community action experiments” to resemble something like a socialist democratic laboratory. It didn’t end up that way. With unwise alacrity, Johnson sent his program to Congress in March of 1964. As Harris Wofford notes in his book, the choice Johnson made to replace Hackett with as supervisor of his War on Poverty surprised many people. But Johnson couldn’t wholly kill it, since Robert Kennedy was still attorney general. Instead, he added other elements to it: a job training program, a summer jobs program, a work-study program, assistance to small farms and small business, and the aforementioned VISTA program. This brought in other parts of the administration, like the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Office of Education.
Bobby Kennedy had targeted help for pre-school children that would bypass the regular school system. Later, RFK continued in this vein by saying: "The institutions which affect the poor—education, welfare, recreation, business, labor—are huge, complex structures, operating outside their control. They plan programs for the poor, not with them." (Matusow, p. 126) What Kennedy and Hackett were saying was rather simple: How can we trust the same people who allowed these inequities in the first place with the millions meant to cure them? (Schulman, p. 94) Author Schulman then listed a few examples that proved the Hackett/Kennedy warning. By 1967, Johnson had folded his cards on community action. He allowed them to be taken over by the local entities Hackett & Kennedy feared. In the end, LBJ had lost all faith in it and said it was being run by “kooks and sociologists”. (Matusow, p. 270) The beginning of Johnson losing faith started in Watts in the late summer of 1965. To his credit, I have never read anything that states that Bobby Kennedy had his “I told you so” moment at this time, even though, as we have seen, he did predict it. RFK visited Watts in November of 1965. When he returned, he told a couple of his staffers, Ed Edelman and Adam Walinsky, to continue with Hackett’s research, but to take it a step further. He wanted ideas on how to address the entire phenomenon of the urban ghetto and how to structurally transform it. They did so, and in January of 1966, the senator gave three speeches on the subject of race and poverty. (John Bohrer,The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, pp. 255-61) Those speeches marked the birth of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration project.
It was RFK’s answer to Lyndon Johnson and the New Deal. As Michael Harrington said of RFK, “As I look back on the sixties, he was the man who actually could have changed the course of American history.” (Wofford, p. 420) Journalist Pete Hammill wrote RFK before the presidential race of 1968: "I wanted to remind you that in Watts, I didn’t see pictures of Malcolm X or Ron Karenga on the walls. I saw pictures of JFK." One is left to imagine what America would be like today if President Kennedy had lived, and Bobby Kennedy and Dave Hackett had run the War on Poverty. Without Vietnam, and those men in charge, it is even possible that America would not have burned.
Oliver Stone - Tom Fordy and The Telegraph: With a new documentary and a new autobiography Chasing the Light coming out, Oliver Stone is once again being met, in advance, by trolls intent on burying the truth of JFK’s foreign policy and his assassination. Fordy is a Warren Commission shill who might as well be writing in 1967. Yet in some cases, he is even worse than that. As everyone knows, the 1991 film JFK was based largely on Jim Garrison’s 1988 book On the Trail of the Assassins. That book was essentially Garrison’s memoir of his investigation into the murder of President Kennedy which he conducted through his position as DA of New Orleans Parish. Stone’s film was so cinematically powerful and its intellectual effect so shocking that it provoked the creation of a new agency of government: The Assassination Records Review Board. That board was in session from 1994–98 and declassified 2 million pages of previously redacted papers; 60,000 documents in all. It then declassified, on a timed-release schedule, thousands more. Fordy's foot in mouth moment is when he says that Kennedy signed off on an attempted assassination of Fidel Castro. Again, this shows that neither Fordy nor Drinkwater ever read the declassified documents of the ARRB, because, in 1995, the Board issued an unredacted version of the CIA’s Inspector General Report on the plots to kill Fidel Castro. On several pages of that report, one will see the issue of presidential authorization of the Agency plots addressed. In every instance, the reply comes back in the negative. In other words, the CIA had no such presidential authorization from Kennedy or any other president, i. e. Dwight Eisenhower or Lyndon B. Johnson. Source: kennedysandking.com
In the years since John F. Kennedy Jr's passing, the fascination doesn’t seem to be on the level of Marilyn Monroe/James Dean-like cult, and there are not nearly as many death theories and myths that haunt his father’s legacy. With the exception of Steven Gillon's The Life of John F. Kennedy Jr: America's Reluctant Prince, the rest of published memoirs about him or his wife Carolyn Bessette were sketchy or trashy. However, there is a brief yet good memoir that explains the political icon as a flesh-and-blood man, written by someone who really knew well, his best friend, The Men We Became: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr. Robert T. Littell first met John Kennedy Jr. while they were both freshmen at Brown University in 1979. Their instant bond grew into a life-long friendship, until Kennedy died at the age of 38. “I felt obligated to stand up for him, frankly,” Littell says. “He bent over backwards just to be a great guy.” JFK talking about his children: "I hope my children live as good people, that they understand that though they have what many don’t, that does not make them better—but that they can do better, they can help make a difference in this land of freedom in which freedom has not been given to all. My hope is that they’re gracious and sensible in their actions. And if politics is their passion, well, I can’t very well argue with that now can I?”
Robert Littell, who was born in Milwaukee and brought up in Connecticut, had a rough go of it himself. Though he was upper-middle-class and attended prep school, his father, a writer, had committed suicide at 40. His mother had remarried but more for worse than for better. He thinks of his family as “dysfunctional,” and describes himself as a “street-smart Republican.” Although the friendship would seem unlikely, he says this was a good basis for his relationship with Kennedy. “We were both brought up by women,” he says, “and we both lacked a strong father figure. We sort of linked arms from that. We had the exact same experience there. There was a shared trauma between us for not having a dad. I watched his mind develop and mature. He learned how to master his negotiating skills. He already had the focus and the intellect inside of him and he learned how to bring it out and master it over the years.” Littell witnessed this first-hand, during their years together at Brown, and then during their student trips to Europe on the cheap (because of John’s love of being just an average guy). They also shared an apartment together after college, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
“John was a bad drinker,” Littell recalls. “He was a two or three-beers guy. He couldn’t have six beers. He was the kind of guy who just wanted to be in control all the time. He really valued his sense of control. He needed to, because he was always ‘on stage.’ He was a modern Renaissance man.” It seemed inevitable that John would go into some sort of public service, like most of his family. However he wanted to do it on his terms. “He was offered to run for office in New Jersey and Rhode Island,” Littell says, “but he wanted to do it in New York. Everyone had expectations but he didn't want to lead as a young man. He wanted to have his youth first. He wanted to give back. He wanted to serve the people–not for recognition. He didn’t need it. He already had it.” Littell married soon after college, and had two children and settled into a life of domestic bliss in Manhattan. “John respected and admired my getting married and having kids,” he says.
“John was naturally monogamous. When Christina Haag broke up with her boyfriend, he said to me, ‘My future wife is free!’ He wanted to have a nice, stable life. He admired his sister Caroline’s life, and wanted to have that and as soon as possible. After his mother Jackie died, it was a heavy burden, because he was now an orphan. He wanted to have a family of his own.” Of course, his future wife turned out not to be Christina Haag or Daryl Hannah but Carolyn Bessette, who, according to Littell, was “the most empathetic, sensitive person that I’ve ever met. She was my children’s favorite friend. And she wanted to be sensitive. She didn’t want to develop a thick skin. I think her sensitivity sometimes hurt her, but they were soul mates. They loved each other tremendously. When they were together, sparks flew.” John Perry Barlow, another good friend of John Jr. recalled of the Cumberland ceremony: "I remember many odd moments at John's wedding. I was having a languid conversation with Christiane Amanpour and Jackie's old boyfriend Maurice Tempelsman. I had many vivid experiences of that wedding, including John sternly telling me that now she was married, I could no longer leer at his wife Carolyn."
“John made me a much better person by his loyalty, his sense of honor, how polite and graceful he was to everybody,” Littell says. “He related to the underdog. He couldn’t stand the idea of elitism. He was actually a very simple man. He was a camper sort of guy. He liked to ground himself. He was not cynical. He was a really kind guy. He was stubborn and told me again and again: ‘I will never be a cynic.’ He was an innovator for starting George magazine and he had a lot of courage. His magazine began to hemorrhage money and was expected to lose $10 million in 1999. To John’s frustration, George never earned the respect of the journalistic community, which considered it an amateur venture. The fact that he made that decision that he was not going to be cynical, that he was going to rinse himself of that, was really inspirational.” Source: www.popentertainment.com
We cut back to the day of the interview, where Mickey gives Wayne plenty of well-composed quotable remarks to fill his program - explaining his motives plainly as being a ‘natural born killer’, thus giving the movie a title - and then a riot goes down in the laundry room which forces the deputies to concentrate their efforts on pacifying the other inmates; giving Mickey an opportunity to take the camera crew hostage and force the release of Mallory from her holding cell - the two having been separated for a year and romantically longing for each other since. The idea Stone wants to present is clear - that media enterprises like those ‘American Maniacs’ is inspired by and represent are deeply immoral and often help aid or indeed validate the actions of those they’re so eager to depict. Meanwhile, Wayne is eager to get this one final interview, primarily because he stands to gain massive ratings and therefore financial compensation for his work. It's the fact that Wayne Gail and the network he represents stands to gain a lot of money by continually making content about people like Mickey and Mallory. There’s a *capitalist* incentive there, rather than one of mere perverse intellectual curiosity.
There’s a real meaningful interesting point being made here about how the media is a participant in the events it depicts, and it demonstrates this literally by having Wayne Gail and his camera be part of the climax and its action. Wayne is directly responsible for Mickey and Mallory’s escape, by naively playing into their hands, by assuming control because he’s a big media boy with a TV network backing him, and without fully grasping exactly who he’s dealing with. Because of course, the big punchline here is that Mickey and Mallory Knox are both actively, knowingly exploiting their own infamy as a means to escape prison - and just Wayne is the naive conduit for that. In a way, the script aims to comment on exactly that kind of media irresponsibility, and it does it with surprising deftness.
Oliver Stone decided he wanted almost every single shot in the film to use a different lens, a different stock, and a different angle so therefore no single shot can be seen as objective. Not even standard shot reverse has a 1:1 equivalency. We transition to scenes with TV static and brief shots of Coca-Cola commercials as if we’re thumbing through a cable box, occasionally interrupted by subliminal flashes. The scenes themselves are littered with fake rear-projection backgrounds, overlays, and coloured lighting, designed to deliberately highlight the artificiality and unreality of the production, to a positively Brechtian degree. Not a single frame in Oliver Stone’s production goes by without reminding you that you’re taking part in viewing a piece of media and not real people inhabiting a real world. What they’ve done here is an attempt to turn it into a kind of metafilm - what Stone is attempting here is a kind of Bretchian ‘Epic Theatre’, i.e. a production that emphasises the unreality of the production itself.
With the goal being to make the audience confront what their reality actually is - because according to Brecht, once you know how all of this works, or is made to work, you can speculate on what it could be. So this gharishness is essentially a type of ‘deliberate estrangement.’ NBK is a quintessential Generation X movie. The critical response was negative in general, seeing his satire as 'too blunt.' However, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four and wrote, "Seeing this movie once is not enough. The first time is for the visceral experience, the second time is for the meaning." Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Oliver Stone's vision in Natural Born Killers is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering." Sticking with the Brechtian influence on Stone's filming tecniques in NBK, you could even argue that this film reframes the story as "Two B-movie action heroes are constructed for public consumption, they become aware they are a part of a media construct, and manipulate their media construct in order to destroy it, and thus attain freedom". -"The Social Construction of Nature and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers" (2012) by Jeremy Withers
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