Oliver Stone in Chicago: JFK slaying was a conspiracy
It was conspiracy theory 101 Thursday night at Northeastern Illinois University as famed film director Oliver Stone explained — on the eve of the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — why there had to have been a second shooter.
“It was a vicious, vicious ambush pulled off by sharpshooters, people who could shoot a moving target and not get freaked out. It’s a very hard thing to do,” Stone told a packed auditorium on the Northwest Side campus. “No team from the FBI or any team has accomplished on the first try what Oswald did with a s---- little bolt-action rifle that had a defective sight.”
Stone questioned a predominant feeling in the media that favors the simple explanation: Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed Kennedy.
“The consensus is for some reason is that Oswald did it alone, and all we freaky people out here — that is the vast majority of us who don’t believe that and have never believed — there’s something illogical and stupid about us that we can’t accept that Oswald alone could change history, because we idealize JFK. . . . It feels like Soviet-era propaganda.”
He pointed to the “magic bullet” theory popularized in his movie “JFK.”
“This magic bullet that jumps around seven wounds in two people. It bothers the s--- out of anyone who served. It doesn’t make sense, it defies gravity and it defies common sense,” said Stone, who served in Vietnam.
Stone, who was an initial supporter of President Barack Obama but has questioned his lack of backbone to stand up for the beliefs he trumpeted on the campaign trail, doubts a similar assassination could take place today.
“I don’t think that kind of assassination with the Internet and cellphones could even happen today. There’s no need to kill the president. He hasn’t done anything, Obama. . . . If that had happened in this day, they would have been all over it. Photos would have showed up right away. There would be Internet activity. The government would not have gotten away with this sealed coverup where the media fell in line right away.”
Stone pointed the finger at U.S. government officials as being behind the Kennedy assassination.
“I think it had to be somebody from inside, more powerful in some ways than the president of the United States,” he said.
He thinks the answer lies within 1,200 documents pertaining to the assassination that the government won’t make public.
“It’s hard to get files out of this government. We are definitely not the transparent government that Obama promised,” he said.
Stone shared the stage with Peter Kuznick, an American University professor who collaborated with Stone to make a Showtime documentary, “The Untold History of the United States,” a portion of which was aired Thursday.
Kuznick said Kennedy stood up to military leaders pushing for military action around the world.
“There was a lot of reason to think that had he lived, the world could have turned out very differently,” Kuznick said.