One of my personal email accounts starts with “northwoods63.” When I get questions about it (which is infrequent, because it’s used mostly by friends and family who know me fairly well), people usually want to know if it’s an indication that I’m into backpacking, off-roading or similar “woodsy” activities.
No. “Northwoods” was the code name for one of the Pentagon’s little we’re-just-thinking-about-it-we-aren’t-actually-going-to-do-it schemes. If the plan had been implemented, a prominent American politician would have been assassinated and the crime pinned on pro-Castro operatives in order to provoke a war with Cuba. Given that summary description, the meaning of the “63” at the end of the address becomes obvious.
Next question, then: am I a big conspiracy-head? Again, no. If you backed me into a corner and forced me to reveal my best guess about the truth behind the Kennedy assassination, I’d have to admit that I think it was the work of a conspiracy. But I’d be using the term “conspiracy” in its legal sense: an agreement by two or more people to commit a crime. The ties between Lee Harvey Oswald and Guy Bannister (not to mention the ties between Oswald and George de Mohrenschildt) … well, we don’t need to get into the minute details here. Suffice it to say that my chief suspects are a loose-knit cabal of mid-level intel operatives, right-wing paramilitary fanatics, the Mafia and anti-Castro Cubans. The cover-up might have gone higher, but the best evidence suggests that the crime itself was considerably more mundane.
The whole conspiracy-head thing brings me mindful of “Oswald’s Ghost,” an essay on the subject by Ron Rosenbaum. He leads the piece by recounting an encounter in Dealey Plaza with Kennedy assassination buff Penn Jones Jr., a man obsessed with – among other things – the shooter-in-the-sewer theory. Jones pries up a manhole and climbs down into a storm drain, inviting Rosenbaum to follow him. However, when Jones instructs a fellow buff to pull the cover back into place over them, Rosenbaum calls a halt. “I’ll go down into the manhole with them,” he writes, “but I won’t pull the cover over my head.”
I prefer one step even further back. I enjoy peering down into the manhole, but something keeps me from actually climbing down into it. I even like to limit my peering. If you stare too long into the manhole, the manhole stares also into you.
Further, most conspiracy theories fall quick victim to Whitehead’s Corollary to Occam’s Razor: if “conspiracy” and “stupidity” are equally plausible explanations for a phenomenon, the latter is most likely correct. Low-level bungling trumps high-level scheming in just about every case I’ve ever personally encountered, and that shapes my opinions of the machinations of government, industry, organized crime and the like.
Fortunately, that doesn’t prevent us from having some fun with the whole conspiracy thing. The following eight movies do an excellent job of supplying both food for thought and solid entertainment.
JFK – Just as the Kennedy assassination is the king of the conspiracies, this movie is the king of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy pictures. However, I wish writer/director Oliver Stone hadn’t sucked a lot of the fun out of it. The picture’s protagonist – New Orleans DA Jim Garrison – in reality was the perfect conspiracy buff: obsessed, diligent, but with a little panache, a touch of Big Easy bon vivant, a character more at home in the pages of John Kennedy Toole than The Boy Scout Handbook. Kevin Costner plays Garrison as the aw-shucks, Capra-corn Ray Kinsella of the JFK assassination.
Costner’s miscasting is symptomatic of how Hollywood gloss interferes with a proper appreciation of the story. Another example: Tommy Lee Jones and Ed Asner are both excellent actors, and they both settle easily into the characters they play (defendant Clay Shaw and spooky fanatic Guy Bannister respectively). However, in real life Shaw and Bannister resembled each other. Thus some of the witnesses who said they saw Oswald with eventually-acquitted Shaw may actually have seen him with known associate Bannister. In Stone’s production, nobody would ever get Jones and Asner mixed up.
Defective vision notwithstanding, the movie does an excellent job of outlining the realm of the Kennedy conspiracy theories and adding some dimension to its dramatis personae. Pay attention only when the picture goes to black and white flashbacks, and the production is both educational and entertaining.
Ruby – I’d choose this picture over the last entry any day of the week. Danny Aiello plays Jack Ruby as a human being with depth and emotion, a welcome break from the cardboard cutout conspirators from Stone’s picture. But what really endears this version to me is the handling of the conspiratorial machinations. We never get the pretense that the whole thing is being spelled out for us. Instead we experience the protagonist’s struggle to keep up with the forces at play. And just like many of us who’ve stood on the rim of the manhole, he meets with only limited success. Thus he’s a lot easier to sympathize with.
Interview with the Assassin – This too is the Kennedy assassination, but from a much different perspective. It’s a pseudo-documentary about a guy with a camcorder who discovers that his next-door neighbor is the Grassy Knoll shooter. Though it turns a little weird in the last act – as if they were having trouble figuring out how to end it – for the most part the production is realistic enough to be downright chilling. If nothing else, I enjoyed the portrayal of a key conspirator as an actual human being rather than a godlike myth.
Seven Days in May – One more Kennedy picture, and then I swear we’ll move on to other conspiracies. In the immediate wake of the assassination, a lot of folks must have longed for a story with a happier ending. Here some big Hollywood names on both sides of the camera cooperate to supply just that: a thinly-disguised version of actual events in which the crime is thwarted at the last minute. Further, the conspiracy here is much larger than in most other iterations. The forces of darkness are out to take over the whole country and put a stop to democracy itself, not just provoke a war with Castro or put a sympathetic President in the White House. Though it’s as preachy as one would expect a Rod Serling script to be, it is sort of comforting to have an everything’s-going-to-be-okay assurance from Hollywood.
The Godfather Part 2 – I love all the organized-crime-loses-Cuba stuff in this picture. Nonetheless, I almost left it off this list. Though most of the movie is good, only a fraction of it is actually about the mob controlling Havana. However, it’s possible to view the picture as an extended conspiracy back-story, a tale of the Corleone family’s rise from petty street crime to a seat of power high enough to influence the fate of nations. From this perspective Michael’s personal woes almost become intrusive, particularly when the classic “I know it was you, Fredo” scene occurs right in the middle of the collapse of the Batista regime. Still, it’s fun to watch the criminal cabals function as any other corporate enterprise would.
The Conversation – This Francis Ford Coppola offering is many things that the Godfather series isn’t: quiet, subtle, intelligent and life-size. Though he’s an odd little man, it’s hard not to sympathize with the audio surveillance expert protagonist as he tries to unravel the plot in which he’s become entangled. Gene Hackman, who plays the lead here, also played a paranoid wiretap specialist in Enemy of the State, another conspiracy movie that might have made this list if it had been a little less Will-Smithy.
Telefon – Most of the movies on this list are downright deadly serious, so I thought I’d throw in something a little lighter. This isn’t a comedy by any standards. But it is a Charles Bronson picture, typical of the actor’s work except that his character isn’t trying to get revenge for anything. Instead, he’s a KGB operative trying to track down and kill a Soviet mind control expert who’s gone mad and is triggering sleeper agents across America in an attempt to spark World War Three.
The Manchurian Candidate – I’ve saved the best for last. John Frankenheimer (who also directed Seven Days in May) serves up a masterpiece. It’s entertaining. It’s visually stunning (particularly the nightmare sequences in which Korean War vets brainwashed by the Chinese relive their “programming” sessions). It’s even thought provoking. And best of all, it features a great conspiracy with a few genuinely surprising surprise twists. If you’re only going to watch two conspiracy movies, then JFK has a lot more of the traditional conspiracy theory elements. But if you watch only one, this should be your choice.
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