RECLAIMING PARKLAND RECLAIMING PARKLAND Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, and the JFK Assassination in the New Hollywood JAMES DIEUGENIO WITH A PREFACE BY LISA PEASE AND A FOREWORD BY WILLIAM DAVY Skyhorse Publishing Copyright © 2013 by James DiEugenio All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018. Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected]. Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation. Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file. ISBN: 978-1-62636-533-9 Printed in the United States of America To my aunt and uncle, Louis and Ernesta Spong, who raised me Contents Preface Foreword Introduction Part 1: How a Calamity Befell Us 1. The Prosecutor 2. The Producers 3. You Call This a Trial? Part 2: Exposing Reclaiming History 4. On First Encountering Reclaiming History 5. Oswald’s Defense 6. Bugliosi on the Zapruder Film and the Autopsy 7. Bugliosi vs. Garrison and Stone 8. Bugliosi on the First Forty-Eight Hours 9. Bugliosi and the FBI 10. Bugliosi Hearts the Warren Commission 11. The DA Acquits Everyone Part 3: From Reclaiming History to Parkland, and Beyond 12. Hanks as Historian: A Case Study 13. Where Washington Meets Hollywood 14. Playtone and Parkland 15. My Dinner with Giorgio Afterword Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index Preface With Reclaiming Parkland, Jim DiEugenio has performed a valuable service. Fifty years after the assassination of President Kennedy, with so many of the facts now available, it’s truly hard to understand how so many figures in the media continue to get the basic facts of the assassination so wrong. Jim approaches this subject from a new angle: by examining the built-in biases of these authors and filmmakers based on past projects and decisions. His revelations go a long way toward explaining how people as bright as Vincent Bugliosi or as lovable as Tom Hanks nonetheless fail to understand and correctly present this history. In this book, Jim exams the recent books and scripts that Hollywood has made (and is making) into films and challenges their core theses. I, too, received a copy of the script of Parkland while it was still in development and was stunned at how overtly dishonest, in terms of the actual facts, it was. I’ve written screenplays. I understand the necessity of reshaping history in small ways to fit a dramatic narrative. I’m one of the first to say, and did say about Charlie Wilson’s War, hey, it’s just a film. But I’m also a student of propaganda methods and techniques, and I know well how fictional presentations of history can inform or mislead an entire generation. I enjoyed Charlie Wilson’s War because I’m an Aaron Sorkin dialog addict, and I wasn’t expecting that any of the so-called history presented would be true. But I support the argument of others. Many people think they critically consume a film, only to refer to events from them later as if they were fact. Most people assume that if a film is purportedly based on a true event, it will be largely true in the important details. This is not always the case. Ironically, that was the case with Oliver Stone’s overly maligned film JFK. Sure, he combined several characters into new ones, compressed timelines, and changed what people had said. You have to do that to tell a more-than-three-hour story in three hours. But as someone who has studied the Kennedy assassinations —plural—for twenty years, I was amazed at how much director Stone and screenwriter Zach Sklar got right. I recognized dialog that came word for word from transcripts of Warren Commission testimony. I knew who the characters were meant to represent, even when the names had been changed or two or more people combined into a fictional character. But the essence of every scene was based on the facts as they were known at the time. So beyond being a fantastic moviegoing experience, which is all anyone should ever expect from a fictional story, it was also, remarkably, quite true to its subject. The same cannot be said for Parkland, Charlie Wilson’s War, and an upcoming film based on books by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann. These presentations don’t just distort history. They misrepresent it in ways so serious one can only call them propaganda. That this is also true of Vincent Bugliosi’s book Reclaiming History, however, is vastly more disturbing. It’s not a film; it’s a book. It is supposed to be a nonfiction presentation. Yet it is so rife, as Jim aptly demonstrates, with errors and distortion that it, too, can only properly be labeled propaganda. In this presentation, Jim ranges far afield, giving us details of the Manson murders as reported in Bugliosi’s most famous book, Helter Skelter, and examining in some detail a mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in which Bugliosi participated. Knowing how much Bugliosi had gotten wrong in Reclaiming History, Jim looked into those earlier cases to understand Bugliosi’s biases. Similarly, one can’t really understand why Tom Hanks would produce a movie like Parkland without understanding who Tom Hanks is, what motivates him, and why he gravitates to certain types of projects. Jim also considers the powerful and sometimes sinister relationship between the Pentagon, the CIA, and Hollywood. It may be harder than ever to get honest films made in the future if we don’t confront this growing alliance. A filmmaker in Hollywood shared a story with me that is relevant here. He had made a documentary about the JFK assassination. Before he went to the meeting where the studio executives were to vet his project, Oliver Stone had handed him a copy of the now-famous CIA memo that dictated instructions to its media assets as to how to refute notions that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. The filmmaker entered the room, and the atmosphere was jovial. He distributed the memo, ran to the restroom, and returned. Suddenly, the atmosphere in the room had turned stone cold. He soon found out why. The author of that CIA memo was one of the people at the vetting table, and the memo had just outed him to the other participants. It’s a bit chilling to consider that the CIA is so deeply embedded in Hollywood that it has the ability to put the kibosh on projects it might feel threatened by. Perhaps that, more than anything, explains the trouble, as Jim discusses, that Salon founder and author David Talbot had when he tried to get a documentary made based on his book Brothers. This book should initiate a discussion of the role that Hollywood increasingly plays in shaping, and often distorting, our history. Because once history is polluted, like the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, Alaska, it can take decades to clean up. That’s why this book is important. This is a book that seeks to dredge that sludge up and return a clearer history to us. I’m grateful to Jim for dedicating a significant portion of his life to this monumental task. Jim did not embark on this journey alone. The book is laden with acknowledged contributions from many lesser-known researchers who have toiled for decades for the same reason Jim has: history actually matters. Our understanding of history determines our future course. If we figure out what happened, then we know what we need to do next. Perhaps the biggest reason some people prefer to read the false history is that it requires nothing of us. If Oswald alone killed Kennedy, there’s no reason to change anything about one’s life. But if the government lied to us, if the media is still lying to us, that tells us just how much was and is still at stake and that we need to take action if we wish to change course. Not everyone wants to confront that reality. Heck, my life would have been simpler had I never picked up Jim Garrison’s fine book on the Kennedy assassination, On the Trail of the Assassins. The truth really is like the red pill in the film The Matrix: once you consume it, you can never go back to your previous mental state again. If you, like most people, long to “fit in,” you need what’s in this book. This book will arm you with the means to defend whatever notion you had that caused you to read this far in the first place. If you tell people you don’t believe Oswald acted alone, you will soon be labeled a “conspiracy theorist.” (I correct those who mislabel me by noting I am actually a “conspiracy realist.”) Be assured you are on the right path. Jim will give you the facts to refute the arguments your well-meaning but ill-informed friends may make. You are in good hands. And if you have a sense of humor at all, you will laugh. If you don’t, schedule an appointment to get your funny bone checked. —Lisa Pease, coeditor of The Assassinations, August 2013