Oliver Stone's Kennedy-Film von 1991

Eine prägnante Stellungnahme zu den Hintergründen des Kennedy-Mordes

Wer "Wer erschoß John F. Kennedy?" von Jim Garrison (siehe Foto rechts) gelesen hat (erst 1992 in Deutsch erschienen), der ist auf den ersten Blick einigermaßen verblüfft von der Verfilmung dieses Buches im Jahr 1991 ("JFK") durch Oliver Stone mit Kevin Costner in der Hauptrolle.

(Übrigens: Jim Garrison war kein so sentimental-"patriotischer" Typ wie er von Kevin Costner gespielt wird und wie es rechts mit dem Foto wohl ausreichend belegt werden kann.)

Verblüfft weil insbesondere im zweiten Teil dieses dreistündigen Filmes sehr glaubwürdige Hypothesen zu den politischen Hintergründen des Mordes an John F. Kennedy (wie auch an Martin Luther King und an Edward Kennedy) erörtert werden, an die man sich von der Lektüre des ins Deutsche übersetzten Garrison-Buches selbst her - zumindest in einer solchen Prägnanz - gar nicht erinnern kann. Oliver Stone soll laut Wikipedia eine Drehbuch-Ausgabe mit den jeweiligen geschichtswissenschaftlichen Belegen nachgeliefert haben. Diese dürfte nicht ohne Interesse sein.

Verblüffung über einen politischen Spielfilm aus dem Jahr 1991

Wird nicht damit der Film selbst zu einem Teil der geschichtswissenschaftlichen Aufarbeitung dieses Mordes? Dazu müßte man sicherlich weitere geschichtswissenschaftliche Studien auch in deutscher Sprache lesen, die mit genau dieser Fragestellung befaßt sind.

Die Verblüffung setzt insbesondere bei der Unterredung des Film-Jim Garrison mit einem hochrangigen Beamten in Washington ein, in der diesem hochrangigen Beamten viele Dinge in den Mund gelegt werden, die doch vieles mit großer Unverfrorenheit und Deutlichkeit beim Namen nennen, wie man es zuvor in dieser Prägnanz noch nicht in Mainstream-Medien gehört hatte (Drehbuch) (die wenigen Einschübe, die das Erzählte direkt nachspielen im Film, sind im folgenden herausgehoben):

(...)
Garrison?
Yes.
Glad you came.
Sorry about the precautions.
I just hope it was worth my while, Mr...?
I could give you a false name, but I won't. Call me "X."
I've already been warned by the Agency, so, if this is another threat--
I'm not with the Agency, Mr. Garrison.
If you've come this far, what I have to say interests you.
I won't name names or tell you who or what I represent.
Except to say you're close.
Closer than you think.
Everything I'll say is classified top secret.
I was a soldier, Mr. Garrison. Two wars.
A secret Pentagon guy, supplying the hardware:
Planes, bullets, rifles...
...for what we call "Black Operations."
Black Ops. Assassinations. Coups d'etat...
...rigging elections, propaganda, psych warfare.
In World War II, I was in Rumania, Greece, Yugoslavia.
I helped evacuate part of Nazi intelligence at the end of the war.
And we used those guys against the Communists.
In ltaly, '48, we stole the elections.
France '49, we broke the strikes.
Overthrew Quirino in the Philippines, Arbenz in Guatemala...
...Mossadegh in Iran. We were in Vietnam in '54...
...Indonesia, '58, Tibet, '59.
Got the Dalai Lama out. We were good.
Very good.
Then we got into the Cuban thing. Not so good.
Set up an invasion to take place in October, '62.
Khrushchev sent missiles to resist. Kennedy didn't invade.
We just had our dicks in the wind.
A lot of pissed-off people, Mr. Garrison.
Understand?
I'll come to that later.
So, 1963....
I spent much of September of '63...
...working on the Kennedy plan to get all US personnel...
...out of Vietnam by the end of 1965.
One of the strongest plans issued by the Kennedy White House...
...National Security Memo 263...
...ordered home the first 1,000 troops.
But in November, a week after the murder of Vietnamese President Diem...
...and two weeks before Kennedy's assassination...
...a strange thing happened to me.
Is Dave in there?
You wanted to see me, General?
I do, indeed.
You're going to the South Pole.
I am?
Dr. Mooney's got the details.
Check with him. Have a nice vacation.
I was sent by my superior, we'll call him "Y"...
...I was sent by General Y to the South Pole...
...as military escort for a group of international VIPs.
I was on my way back, in New Zealand...
...when the President was killed.
Oswald was charged at 7:00 p.m., Dallas time...
...with Tippet's murder.
That's 2:00 p.m. the next day in New Zealand.
But already their papers had the entire history...
...of this unknown, 24-year-old Oswald.
Studio picture, detailed biography, Russian information...
...and were sure that he killed the President alone...
...although it took them four more hours to charge him with that crime in Dallas.
It felt to me as if...
...a cover story was being put out.
Like we would in a Black Op.
After I came back...
...I asked myself, why was I, the chief of Special Ops...
...sent to the South Pole to do a job...
...many others could have done?
I wondered if it could've been because...
...one of my routine duties, if I'd been in Washington...
...would've been to order additional security in Texas.
I checked it out and found that someone...
...told the 112th Military Intelligence Group at Fort Sam Houston...
...to stand down that day, over the protests of Colonel Reich.
I believe it's a mistake.
It's standard procedure, especially in a known hostile city like Dallas...
...to supplement the Secret Service.
Even if we hadn't let him ride with the bubble-top off...
...we would've put 100 to 200 agents on the sidewalk without question.
A month before, in Dallas, UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson was spit on and hit.
There had been attempts on De Gaulle's life in France.
We'd have arrived days ahead, studied the route...
...checked all the buildings.
Never would've allowed open windows overlooking Dealey. Never!
Our own snipers would've covered the area.
If a window went up, they'd have been on the radio!
We'd be watching the crowd: packages, rolled-up newspapers, coats.
Never would've let a man open an umbrella.
Never would've let the car slow down to ten miles an hour.
Or take that unusual curve at Houston and Elm.
You'd have felt an Army presence in the streets that day.
But none of this happened. It violated our most basic protection codes.
And it is the best indication of a massive plot in Dallas.
Who could have best done this?
Black Ops. People in my business.
My superior could've called Col. Reich and said:
"We have another unit coming for security. You'll stand down."
That day, some Army Intelligence people were in Dallas.
I don't know who or why.
But they weren't protecting clients.
And Oswald. Army Intell had a Lee Harvey Oswald on file.
Those files have been destroyed.
Many strange things were happening.
Oswald had nothing to do with them.
The entire Cabinet was in the Far East.
A third of a combat division was returning from Germany...
...in the air above the United States, at the time of the shooting.
At 12:34 p.m., the Washington telephone system went out for an hour.
On the plane back to Washington...
...word was radioed from the Situations Room...
...to Johnson that there was only one assassin.
Sound like coincidences to you?
Not for one moment.
The Cabinet was out of the way.
Troops for riot control were in the air.
Telephones were out to stop the wrong stories from spreading.
Nothing was left to chance.
He could not be allowed to escape alive.
Things were never the same after that.
Vietnam started for real. There was an air of...
...make-believe in the Pentagon and CIA.
Those of us in Secret Ops knew the Warren Commission was fiction.

Nirgends ein Bezug zur "Secret Society"-Rede Kennedy's

Aber dann werden die Ausführungen noch wesentlich deutlicher. Es wird berichtet, wie John F. Kennedy dabei war, die Herrschaft der Geheimgesellschaften und Geheimdienste zu brechen, ganz so wie es hier auf dem Blog schon vermutet worden war anhand der Secret Society-Rede, die Kennedy zu diesem Thema gehalten hatte. (Bemerkenswerterweise spielt diese Rede im ganzen Film keine Rolle.)

But there was something...
...deeper.
Uglier.
I knew Allen Dulles well. I often briefed him in his house.
But why was he appointed to investigate Kennedy's death? The man who fired him.
Dulles, by the way, was General Y's benefactor.
I got out in '64.
Resigned my commission.
I never realized Kennedy was so dangerous to the establishment.
Is that why?
That's the real question, isn't it? Why?
The how and the who is just scenery for the public.
Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the Mafia...
...keeps them guessing, like a game.
Prevents them from asking the most important question: why?
Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited?
Who has the power to cover it up? Who? 

Den CIA "in tausend Stücke zerschlagen"

Und nun werden die Gründe für seine Ermordung genannt, nämlich die Beendigung der Herrschaft des CIA durch John F. Kennedy nach dem Vorfall in der Schweinebuch. Der CIA wurde durch eine Anweisung Kennedy's "in tausend Stücke zerschlagen" mit Hilfe der US-Armee:

In 1961...
...right after the Bay of Pigs, very few people know this...
...I participated in drawing up National Security Action Memos 55, 56, 57.
These are documents classified top secret.
In them, Kennedy told Gen. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs...
...that from here on, the Joint Chiefs would be wholly responsible...
...for all covert paramilitary action in peacetime.
This ended the reign of the CIA.
Splintered it into 1,000 pieces, as JFK promised he would.
And now he was ordering the military...
...to help him do it. Unprecedented!
I can't tell you the shock waves this sent along the corridors of power.
This and the firing of Allen Dulles...
...Richard Bissell and Gen. Charles Cabell.
All were sacred cows in Intell since World War II.
They got some very upset people.
Kennedy's directives weren't implemented because of...
...bureaucratic resistance. 

"Bürokratischer Widerstand" gegen Kennedy

Sogenannter "bürokratischer Widerstand" (wie ihn übrigens auch schon Winston Churchill willfährig über sich ergehen ließ während des Zweiten Weltkrieges von Seiten des Foreign Office) ließ Kennedy laut dieses Informanten im Film nicht durchdringen. Aber der ungenannte Informant in der US-Armee bekam von diesem Zeitpunkt an die "Schwarzen Operationen" auch gegen Kuba unterstellt - laut Film:

But one of the results was...
...the Cuban operation was turned over to my department...
...as Operation Mongoose.
Mongoose was pure Black Ops.
It was secretly based at Miami University...
...which has the largest domestic CIA station...
...budgeted annually for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Three hundred agents, 7,000 select Cubans.
Fifty fake business fronts to launder money.
They waged a non-stop war against Castro.
Industrial sabotage, crop burning, etc.
All under the control of General Y.
He took the rules of covert warfare he'd used abroad...
...and brought them to this country.
Now he had the people, the equipment, the bases...
...and the motivation.
Don't underestimate the budget cuts that Kennedy called for in March of 1963.
Nearly 52 military installations in 25 states.
Twenty-one overseas bases.
Big money.
You know how many helicopters have been lost in Vietnam?
Nearly 3,000 so far.
Who makes them? Bell Helicopter. Who owns Bell?
Bell was nearly bankrupt when First National Bank of Boston asked the CIA...
...to use the helicopter in Indochina. How about the F-111 fighter?
General Dynamics of Fort Worth, Texas. Who owns that?
Find out the defense budget since the war began. $75 going on $100 billion.
Nearly $200 billion will be spent before it's over.
In 1949, it was $10 billion.
No war...no money. 

"Das organisierende Prinzip jeder Gesellschaft ist der Krieg."

"Das organisierende Prinzip jeder Gesellschaft ist der Krieg," läßt Oliver Stone hier den Informanten im Sinne der geheimdienstlichen "Strategie der Spannung" ganz richtig sagen:

The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison...
...is for war.
The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers.
Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War in his second term.
He wanted to call off the moon race and cooperate with the Soviets.
He signed a treaty to ban nuclear testing.
He refused to invade Cuba in 1962.
He set out to withdraw from Vietnam.
But all that ended on the 22nd of November, 1963.
Since 1961, they knew Kennedy was not going to war in Southeast Asia. 

Kennedy war "wie Cäsar von Feinden umgeben", als er seine politischen Berater fragte: "Wenn wir noch nicht mal nach Kuba reingehen, das uns so nahe liegt - warum sollen wir dann nach Vietnam hineingehen, das so weit entfernt ist?"

Like Caesar, he is surrounded by enemies.
Something's underway, but it has no face. Yet, everybody in the loop knows.
Forget about combat troops.
He told McNamara he would pull out the goddamn advisors!
He fucked us in Laos and now he will fuck us in Vietnam!
He can't afford to implement it before the election.
I hear the NSC meeting was a real barn burner.
I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Heads will roll. Hear about Lemnitzer?
What?
Kennedy rubbed Lem's nose in shit.
Said if we didn't go into Cuba, which was so close...
...why go into Vietnam which is so far away?
There he goes again.
Got his hand on the chicken switch.
Lem said that the Chiefs still think we should go into Cuba.
Money's at stake.
Big money. $100 billion.
Kennedy bred voting districts for defense dollars.
He gave TFX fighter contracts only to those counties that will matter in '64.
The people in the loop fight back. Their way.
We have to control the intelligence from Saigon.
We just don't let McNamara stick his nose in this thing!
Every time he goes over to Saigon for a fact-finding mission...
...he comes back and scares the shit out of Kennedy!
Now I want Max Taylor on him night and day...
...like a fly on shit.
You control McNamara, you control Kennedy. 
I think it started like that.
In the wind.
Defense contractors, oil bankers. Just conversation.
A call is made. Maybe to someone like my superior officer General Y.
We're going. We need your help.
When?
In the fall. Probably in the South.
-We want you to come up with a plan. -I can do that.
Everything is cellularized.
No one said, "He must die." No vote. Nothing's on paper.
There's no one to blame.
It's as old as the crucifixion.
Or the military firing squad.
Five bullets, one blank. No one's guilty.
Everybody in the power structure...
...has a plausible deniability.
No compromising connections except at the most secret point.
But it must succeed.
No matter how many die or how much it costs...
...the perpetrators must be on the winning side...
...and never subject to prosecution for anything by anyone.
That is a coup d'etat.
Kennedy announces the Texas trip in September.
At that moment, second Oswalds pop up all over Dallas...
...where they have the mayor and the cops in their pocket.
General Y flies in the assassins.
Maybe from the special camp we keep near Athens, Greece.
Pros.
They'd be locals, Cubans, Mafia hire. Separate teams.
Does it matter who shot...
...from what rooftop?
Part of the scenery.
I keep thinking about that Tuesday...
...the 26th of November.
The day after they buried Kennedy.
Gentlemen, I am not going to let Vietnam go like China did.
I'm committed...
...not to take our soldiers out of there till they know we mean business in Asia.
Lyndon Johnson signs National Security Memo 273...
...which reverses Kennedy's withdrawal policy...
...and approves covert action against North Vietnam...
...provoking the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Just get me elected, I'll give you the damn war.
In that document...
...lay the Vietnam War. 

Politische Morde finden regelmäßig statt - viel zu regelmäßig

Und der Film läßt Garrison antworten: "Ich kann es nicht glauben, daß sie ihn ermordeten, weil er etwas ändern wollte. In unserer Zeit. In unserem Land." Nun, John F. Kennedy war nicht der erste und nicht der letzte, der ermordet wurde und der ermordet werden wird, weil er etwas grundlegend ändern wollte oder will auf politischem Gebiet. In Rußland geschieht dies heute in fast allwöchentlicher Regelmäßigkeit. Deutschland weist eine Regelmäßigkeit mit etwas größeren zeitlichen Abständen auf. Hier auf dem Blog ist schon viel darüber berichtet worden:

I can't believe they killed him because he wanted to change things.
-In our time, in our country! -They've done it throughout history.
Kings are killed. Politics is power, nothing more!
Don't take my word for it. Do your own thinking.
The size of this is...
...beyond me.
Testify.
-Me? -Testify.
No chance in hell.
No, I'd be arrested and gagged. Maybe sent to an institution.
Maybe worse. You too.
I can give you the background. You find the foreground, the little things.
Dig, you're the only one to bring a trial in Kennedy's murder.
That's important. It's historic.
I haven't yet.
I don't have much of a case.
You don't have a choice anymore.
You're a significant threat to the national security structure.
They'd have killed you already, but there's light on you.
So they'll destroy your credibility.
They already have in many circles.
Be honest.
Your only chance is to come up with a case. Something. Anything.
Make arrests. Stir the shitstorm.
Hope to start...
...a chain reaction of people coming forward.
Then the government will crack.
Fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth.
And the truth is on your side, bubba.
I just hope you get a break.

Beim Ansehen des Filmes bleibt bei aller Realitäts- und Plausibilitätsnähe eine Restspur von Hollywood-Sentimentalität, die dem Thema ganz und gar unangemessen ist. Aber was will man auch erwarten angesichts der Filme, die der "Tausendsassa" Oliver Stone ansonsten schon so fähig war zu produzieren. Der rein inhaltlichen Aussage dieses Filmes tut das aber keinen Abbruch.