Customer Reviews

Oswald's Ghost

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Not an investigation and no new insights here, but true to the title, this is a look at the lingering presence of the mystery of Oswald and the assassination that will forever link him with JFK.

The implied conclusion (big surprise) of this PBS broadcast film is that Oswald acted alone but that we are not psychologically able to grasp that fact since recent polls suggest 70% of Americans think otherwise.

None of the big lingering mysteries of that day are explained or explored. Are there high tech forensics that can be used today to look at the event? Not touched on.

Only the varying opinions of those involved as newscasters or lawyer and authors. Some glaring contradictions are not followed up like Dan Rather's incorrect original description of the head-snap of JFK after seeing the Zapruder film. Rather is interviewed for the film but not asked that question even though it is pointed out in a vintage clip.

And has anyone done stress analysis audio tests on Oswald's recorded vocal denial of any involvement in the assassination?

Some of the vintage footage is especially sharp.

Engaging but not revealing.

To me the most irritating thing about the movie is what I call "genre creep" (It is a relative of the late 1970s tax term bracket creep)

It starts out saying that its purpose it not to takes sides in the debate between LN's and CTers: its supposedly noble purpose is to show the delibilitating effect on the American "left" (Note that the rightwing doesn't seem to NEED such paternalistic gatekeeping)

And the aim is to keep it that way. It does not surprise me that Stone aims his film at left liberals. That is where there has been a history of gatekeeping operations (witness Encounter magazine, before you scoff) And no this does not mean that Stone was a willing collaborator in a dinisinformation campaign. Who knows where along the chain of decision making that allowed this film to be seen by millions the disinformation came in. And no it cannot be said with certain that it was conscious disinformation. Yet the Encounter's focus on a similar left-liberal firewall strategyThe Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters to prevent further left curiosity about the CIA suggests it, as does the new book called The Mighty Wurlitzer about CIA domestic front groups.

Just how many American experience films to you see THAT ACTIVELY DISCOURAGES FURTHER PERSUIT OF A TOPIC? The timing is understandable, what with Harvard University Press about to publish David Kaiser's PRO-CONSPIRACY ANALYSIS and with Jeff Morley of the WaPost offering similar evidence in his new book Our Man in Mexico about the CIA Station Chief in Mexico City Win Scott, things are getting pretty desparate for the Lone Nutters. Their only solution is to dissuade the younger crowd by saying "conspiracy theory" and saying flying saucers as per the X-files formula that is finally wearing away.

Then it proceeds to give "both sides of the story" using outdated sources for the CT side.

Then, while clearly having won its own match-- umpired by itself it denies that any match occured at all and the intention was just to investigate a debilitating psychological state.

This is what is so gutless. It gives an biased point of "both sides of the story" and then denies it had any intention of passing judgement. This might well be what disingenuous means.

Oswald's Ghost is not, on the surface, just another documentary on the assassination of John F. Kennedy seeking to prove one theory or another. Yet while the film ostensibly is not on the whodunit but that question ahs done to us, Oswald's Ghost has a definite bias in it. But even if on disagrees with this interpretation of the facts, there is still something to be watched here.

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 make the film visually interesting and watch-able, even if one doesn't agree with the facts as presented.

Thus the film's fault lies in its bias. While Stone does offer the conspiracy theorists plenty of screen time to defend their views and for the most part I'll admit the film is pretty even handed. Yet in the last few minutes of the film, 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 takes the viewer from a fair-minded look at the how the specter of the Kennedy assassination looms over America to a biased attempt to prove Oswald acted alone in the assassination.

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. At times fair and at times biased, Oswald's Ghost is not for all tastes. But for anyone interested in the assassination, the film should be seen.

Oswald Ghost is a carbon copy of the WC.There is absolutely nothing new it has to offer except the same old Regurgitated story that ''Oswald did it and did it alone''!why not Make a movie that Presents both sides of the issue so that the viewer can decide whether JFK was killed as a result of a conspiracy or by a ''Lone Nut LHO''This movie is a piece of Biased Propaganda design to Confound the Novice who is not a student of the Assassination!!

The above title is a paraphrase of film maker Robert Stone's own explanation about what compelled him to make this seductive and oddly unnerving documentary. He says it at the end of his 16 minute interview which is part of the bonus material on the newly released DVD of 'Oswald's Ghost' The film itself is not so much about who did or did not kill JFK, although Stone comes out, on the wings of some beautifully cadenced articulation from Norman Mailer, with a plausibly reasoned narrative that shows Oswald was far more intelligent, educated, motivated and therefore capable of soley killing one of the most popular presidents of the century than most of us would ever care or dare to suspect. But whether or not this may sway your JFK conspiratorial or anti conspiratorial belief system, his real aim is to look at the nature and actual necessity of the conspiracy theory itself, something which all the anti-establishment and pro establishment theorists never seem to have done

JFK's assasination was a national trauma rivaled only by 911, but what made it most appaling was millions of people like myself, then in high school, had to witness the subsequent assasination of prime suspect Lee Harvey Oswald by some Dallas saloon operator on national live tv. The impact of those four days is immeasurable, but Stone should be applauded for exploring what this meant to a decade, a generation and ultimately an entire society to the present day.

His film is not able, nor motivated, to cover all the narratives, let alone all the angles of the most common narratives that spun out of those days on our collective political subconscious, but his sharp film making and archive footage research skills project us into a realm where we get an uneasy sense of the anger, anxiety and paranoia that the assasination and its twisted aftermath took us through - virtually to the edge of a kind of national psychosis.

I first saw the film in a theatre and whether you have seen it there or on The American Experience, there is still something to be gained from watching the DVD with its bonus material. One segment, titled "A Visit to Dealey Plaza" has a feeling that we are watching a 19th century side (I am tempted to say freak) show, where a fast talkin' barker spins a whole cloth conspiracy rant that lassoes Nixon, LBJ, J Edgar Hoover, Howard Hunt, Lamar Hunt and Woody Harrelson's dad altogether in a book of pictures and headlines that we can neither see nor read. He wraps it up as few can do outside of Texas with " As they say at Hallmark: We Care Enough to Send the Very Best, and We Sure Didn't Hire any Amateurs to Kill our President". Hysterical stuff, except that many people, myself included, have tended to believe all or most of it at some point or another, and can still be easily swayed, even after watching Oswald's Ghost several times.

The fingering of LBJ as conspirator (who sealed off the investigation being done on him soon as he was sworn in) is interesting because in Stone's film, former White HOuse reporter Robert Dallek describes LBJ as one establishment official who didn't swallow the Warren Commission's finding, and became sufficiently paranoid enough of theories involving Castro and the Soviets that he became delusionally obsessed with showing his prowess in Vietnam. There's one not so oft cited glimpse at how the events and our need to make sense out of things that don't add up effect not only our thinking, but our history. Stone makes an even stronger observation at the end of his interivew when he talks about how the belief by 70% of our population that Oswald did not act alone has impacted how we think even of today's historic presidential election. So many people younger people that he has talked with in the lasst year or two who are not old enough to remember 1963 believe all the parties are the same, that they are all corrupt, that no one tells the truth, and therefore why participate, why vote? This sort of 21st century malaise is not something that Robert Stone was able to explore deeply in Oswald's Ghost, but perhaps more than anything, it justifies a title whose legacy only seems to grow more unsettling through time.

My friends and I put this on and laughed non-stop. One of the last feeble attempts by the government (PBS?- NOT A COINCIDENCE) to maintain lone assassin fable. The fact is that the research and literature is so far past this point that this so-called documentary seems to be chronologically made in 1967 or so. What a joke. The interview with Robert Stone, the filmmaker is the best. We couldn't stop laughing at this nitwit. He is clueless of his own subject matter. He doesn't even believe a conspiracy existed. What a moron. But then here is PBS putting this on with all the fanfare and credentials of the American Experience. Hey, maybe they should be defunded. Try reading "Bloody Treason by Noel Twyman for starters then come back to me with Robert Dalleck and these other Warren Commission supporters. Well, they must have convinced someone out there with this schlockumentary and that is why it exists - as propaganda. It should be rated P for Propaganda.

This is not supposed to be another film about WHO killed President Kennedy. It is, as the description above states, a film about how America has searched for answers as to what exactly happened on November 22, 1963.

"Oswald's Ghost" is a polished, glossy history of how the conspiracy theories started and why. The film doesn't provide any new answers. Instead, it seeks to understand why controversy still swirls around the Kennedy assassination 45 years after it was allegedly solved.

That search for answers has been an important chapter in American History, and thus "Oswald's Ghost" is a welcome addition to the American Experience series. I think it's a refreshing departure from the flimsy, conspiracy-theory-laden pap like "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" and the like that seem to pop up every five years on the major anniversaries of Kennedy's death.

Robert Stone's new documentary, Oswald's Ghost (PBS), is another attempt by the establishment media to obscure the facts of the Kennedy assassination. Stone shows us Oswald's face a million times, gives the floor to grandfatherly authorities who claim "no new evidence", and smears conspiracy theorists in a series of slick hypnotic sequences. The passion and work of these independent researchers is nowhere seen in this visually adroit but ahistorical, lopsided, propagandistic defense of the Warren Report.

In the 1970s, it was revealed by government investigation that the CIA had 400+ "assets" working in the US media. One wonders how many assets are ranking propagandists and content gatekeepers in the much expanded US media today, including PBS.

Caesar was not assassinated by a lone centurion; he was attacked by senators. When a nation inherits the mantle of empire, as the US did after WWII, the stakes are raised and the power much coveted. When Kennedy fired Allen Dulles and planned to dismantle his powerful CIA, which had begun to overstep its directive, they went after him. They brought in "defector" Oswald conveniently as a patsy, gave him FBI ties to keep Hoover at bay, sent a crew to Dallas, removed Kennedy's usual security detail, and shot him in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

What has turned this simple conspiracy into a 44-year-old "haunting" is the media's continuing collusion with the government in the subsequent coverup: muddying the waters with countless phony conspiracy theorists who introduced false leads (LBJ did it! the Mafia did it!) to the discredit of the research community; maintaining a 44-year blackout on so much evidence that has come forward; dancing around the facts and treating the American public like children, for some irrational fear that they should learn the truth and actually participate in democracy. Oswald's Ghost merely extends the coverup.

I am surprised that this program stirred up so much bitterness in some reviewers. I could see very little that was controversial in it - in fact little that was new information. Some of the commentaries were a little confused but the majority of the information has been known by most of the world for forty years now. It is still a mystery so no-one has the real answer. The final idea in what was a relatively balanced program is that Oswald had the ability to kill Kennedy, and acted alone. Personally, I do not believe that. However, in this program evidence from both sides was given, but, in my opinion, ignored at its conclusion. However, most programs with a point to make tend to do that. This one is just a counter to those who believe that there was a conspiracy (that is, more that one person was involved in the assassination). I tend to 'believe' more than one person was involved (in fact, I am convinced) but there is as much evidence one way or the other.
It is interesting how this topic stirs up antagonistic reactions.
Oliver Stone is in this program for less that 5 minutes and seems to have caused a reaction far exceeding his influence here.
However, the program could have been more interesting and enlightening to watch if it was not drowned in noise. The background `music' obliterated most of the dialogue and totally distracted the viewer from actually listening to the arguments posed - I had to strain to listen to the dialogue most of the time. At one stage, a scene which represented someone on a truth drug seemed to imply the producers were on it as well - such was its strangeness.
This program could have been edifying but was totally spoilt by the production and background sound effects which were appalling. Why producers seemed to think they are needed I have no idea. Perhaps American viewers have become immune to jarring and screaming noises whilst trying to concentrate. This is a pity - because, although much of the material has been known for years, a watchable revamped program on the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination would have been really beneficial. So if you can watch this more than once without wanting to shut the sound off, I congratulate you. Why do they spoil programs like this? It is the dialogue I want to hear not the special sound effects which are totally inappropriate anyway.

In 1991, Hollywood director Oliver Stone presented a visually stunning but ultimately disjointed analysis of Pres. Kennedy's assassination in his film, "JFK."
Now documentarian Robert Stone has also lavished viewers with an array of rare and spectacular visuals while totally eschewing any real search for the truth.
PBS owes it to America to re-examine the JFK murder and its cover-up in a more objective manner. Simply follow the separate paths of Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby and see where they lead.
Oswald's surrogate father, Charles "Dutz" Murret, worked as a bookie for Carlos Marcello's organization in New Orleans, but when he was interviewed by the Warren Commission no one bothered to ask him about that. Ruby was clearly connected to Mafia leaders such as Giancana, Roselli and Trafficante. The Mafia was working with CIA agents to kill Castro, and Oswald had a myriad of contacts with both pro- and anti-Castro Cubans, U.S. military intelligence, KGB, FBI etc.
The plot thickens.
Check out the work of historians Peter Dale Scott, James DiEugenio, Lamar Waldon, David Scheim, John Davis and Larry Hancock, to name a few.
Robert Stone's documentary was slickly produced, but poorly informed.
Please re-investigate this, the most important unsolved crime of the 20th century.