Parkland is a 2013 American historical drama film that recounts the chaotic events that occurred following John F. Kennedy's assassination. The film is written and directed by Peter Landesman, produced by Playtone's Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and Bill Paxton with Exclusive Media’s Nigel Sinclair and Matt Sinclair. The film is based on the book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by Vincent Bugliosi.
Parkland weaves together the perspectives of a handful of ordinary individuals suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances: the young doctors and nurses at Parkland Hospital; Dallas’s chief of the Secret Service; an unwitting cameraman who captured what became the most famous home movie in history; the FBI agents who were visited by Lee Harvey Oswald before the shooting; the brother of Lee Harvey Oswald, left to deal with his shattered family; and JFK’s security team, witnesses to both the president’s death and Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s rise to power.
JFK: Seven Days that Made a President
Next Showing: Saturday 16 November at 10:00PM - National Geographic Channel
Who killed JFK? Fifty years on, slew of new books add fuel to conspiracy fire
JFK: Seven Days that Made a President
This feature-length documentary tells the story of seven critical moments that shaped the man who became a twentieth century icon.
America’s most popular modern president was a man of great vision who inspires to this day.
But behind the conviction and the charisma, JFK was a man of contradictions.
A wise and cautious leader who behind the scenes, lived his personal life on the edge.
A vision of health and vigor hiding a private struggle with his health from the world.
There are seven key days that will change the way you see him - moments of crisis, times when he had to stand up and decide his own future and the future of the nation.
The day he rescued the stricken crew of his Navy patrol boat in World War Two and became an American War hero; the television debate with Nixon that helped win him the election and marked the dawn of the TV age; Marilyn Monroe’s birthday serenade that risked his political career; theCuban Missile Crisis when he prevented the world from plunging into nuclear war; the day he threw his weight behind the civil rights cause, and of course the fateful day of his assassination.
In the year that marks the fiftieth anniversary of his death, this film includes interviews with friends and colleagues of JFK, as well as leading historians, rare archive material and dramatic reconstruction to give the audience front-row seats to these world-changing events.
Repeats: Sunday 17 November at 6:00PM - National Geographic Channel
Wednesday 20 November at 12:00AM - National Geographic Channel
Who killed JFK? Fifty years on, slew of new books add
fuel to conspiracy fire
Kennedy conspiracy theories
in overdrive as 50th anniversary approaches, with John Kerry the latest to
voice his suspicions
Rory Carroll
The Guardian, Friday 15 November 2013 / http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/15/jfk-death-conspiracy-theories-50-years
When John Kerry fuels doubts that Lee Harvey Oswald acted
alone just as publishers unleash a torrent of JFK assassination books you have
to ask yourself: conspiracy?
Did the the secretary of state pull the trigger on a
clandestine publishing industry marketing plan? Are bookstores in on it? Is
Hollywood connected? Or did Kerry act alone? We may never know.
We do know that Kennedy nostalgia and scrutiny are in
overdrive on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his murder, with dozens of new
books advancing theories novel and dusty over who fired the fatal shots at the
motorcade in Dallas.
Options include Fidel Castro, the mafia, the CIA, J Edgar
Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, the secret service or, on the far outer fringes of
speculation, Joe DiMaggio.
Kerry caused astonishment when he waded into the debate by
telling NBC that he suspected Oswald had external help or inspiration, possibly
from Cuba or Russia. "To this day, I have serious doubts that Lee Harvey
Oswald acted alone."
The comments added unexpected spice to the latest
revelations and claims of revelations about the most parsed, analysed and
disputed moment in US history.
Kennedys Riding in Dallas Motorcade
John and Jackie Kennedy smile at the crowds lining the
motorcade route in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. Photograph:
Bettmann/Corbis
Major US publishing houses have produced dozens of titles
pegged to the November 22 anniversary, swelling a bulging oeuvre of more than a
thousand Kennedy-related books dating back half a century.
The independent house Skyhorse Publishing alone is
publishing 25 assassination-related titles this year, including Blood, Money
& Power: How LBJ Killed JFK, by Barr McClellan, and Destiny Betrayed: JFK,
Cuba and the Garrison Case, by James DiEugenio.
"Every publisher wants to have a book out," said
Jim Milliot, co-editorial director at Publishers Weekly, the industry bible.
"Baby boomers are big book buyers and JFK was the baby boomers'
president."
Fascination will wane as Kennedy becomes more a historical
than mythical figure, he predicted, but for now publishers were mining every
conceivable angle. "There are so many out there, consumers have a lot to
choose from. Maybe that's why none in particular has jumped to the top of the
bestsellers."
Polls tend to show that most Americans reject the Warren
commission's finding that Oswald, acting alone, fired all three shots from the
Texas book depository's sixth floor.
That's a view long shared by senior government officials,
said Jeff Morley, an author and former Washington Post reporter who moderates
the site JFK Facts. "John Kerry is part of a long tradition of insiders
who have questioned the official version."
Morley's 2011 book, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the
Hidden History of the CIA, plumbed the agency's dealings with Oswald before the
assassination. He thinks it implausible that "one guy with no motive"
singlehandedly did it but says truth remains elusive. "Chunks of the story
we don't know."
Morley accused major organisations of being "asleep at
the wheel" in neglecting available documentation and not demanding access
to still-sealed archives. Another problem was that ludicrous and discredited
theories competed for attention alongside serious investigations. "The bad
information obscures debate."
One version posits that DiMaggio (a duck hunter in his spare
time) was seeking revenge for JFK allegedly romancing his ex-wife Marilyn
Monroe.
Another says a man with a black umbrella filmed along the
route fired a poison dart. Another points the finger at a secret service agent
whose regicide was edited out of the Zapruder footage. To guide readers through
the conspiracy maze here is a list of five new books, each representing, with
varying credibility, a popular theory.
Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of US president John F.
Kennedy, reacts as Dallas night club owner Jack Ruby, foreground, shoots at him
from point blank range in a corridor of Dallas police headquarters in 1963. The
plainclothesman at left is Jim A. Leavelle
Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Was Oswald the lone gunman?
Photograph: Bob Jackson/AP
1. The mob did it
• The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination, by Lamar
Waldron (Counterpoint)
Thesis: Godfathers Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante
took out the president to neutralise his anti-mafia crusade. They framed Oswald
and his supposed Cuban puppet-masters, a ruse which deceived LBJ and, to this
day, Kerry.
"They got away with it because they planted the
evidence against Castro," said Waldron. A cover-up endures. "We know
the FBI had Marcello's confession in 1985 and basically suppressed it."
A Warner Brothers film due out next year, based on this and
a previous book co-authored by Waldron, will star Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert
De Niro. "We hope the movie will bring attention to the fact hundreds of
(government) files haven't been released."
2. The CIA did it
• CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys: How and Why US
Agents Conspired to Assassinate JFK and RFK, by Patrick Nolan (Skyhorse)
Thesis: Top spooks Richard Helms and James Jesus Angleto
hired mafia hitmen to murder Kennedy to derail his planned disengagement from
Vietnam and rapprochement with Cuba and the Soviet Union. "Their motive
was power, self-preservation."
Nolan cites research by "world-famous forensic
scientist Dr Henry Lee", who writes the book's foreword, to argue there
was more than one gunman. Nolan's website says he "utilizes the mosaic
method of intelligence, analyzing each piece that is obtained and determining
its relationship to other pieces to arrive at the solution".
Lyndon Johnson
LBJ sworn in aboard Air Force One. Photograph: Cecil
Stoughton/Bettmann/Corbis
3. Lyndon Johnson did it
• The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The case against LBJ, by Roger
Stone (Skyhorse)
Thesis: The vice-president orchestrated an elaborate plot
involving elements in the mob, CIA, White House and Cuban exile community to
eliminate his boss. The motive: JFK planned to dump LBJ from the ticket in
1964, leaving him exposed to corruption probes.
The Texan Johnson's control over Dallas police facilitated
the cover-up of evidence such as a fingerprint in the book depository's
sniper's nest which matched his personal hitman, Mac Wallace.
The truth, says Stone's Amazon entry, was hiding in plain
sight all this time. "LBJ was not just shooting his way into the White
House, he was avoiding political ruin and prosecution and jail for corruption
at the hands of the Kennedy's (sic)."
4. Oswald did it with Cuban help, or inspiration
• A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the
Kennedy Assassination, by Philip Shenon (Henry Holt and Co)
The thesis: Oswald flirted with Cuban officials in Mexico
City shortly before the assassination and possibly had help setting it up. At
the very least, he hoped to impress the Castro government. The CIA, FBI and
others in Washington sabotaged the Warren commission by withholding evidence to
protect reputations and cover up their own missteps in dealing with Oswald
before the murder. Reviewers have praised the former New York Times
investigative reporter's tome as a sober, balanced account.
5. Oswald acted alone
• History Will Prove Us Right: Inside the Warren Commission
Report on the Assassination of John F Kennedy, by Howard Willens, (Overlook)
The thesis: A loner with a rifle and a grudge did it alone.
Willens, one of the commission's few living staff members,
gives a behind-the-scenes take on the investigation, its personalities and
methodology. One by one he discards alternatives to the lone gunman theory.
Willens admits mistakes in the investigation, but says these
did not affect the veracity of its ultimate conclusion. He defends chief
justice Earl Warren's prediction that "history will prove that we are
right".
For sceptics this is the greatest conspiracy theory of all,
a brazen lie to whitewash the crime and aftermath.
August 12, 2013
Kennedy, and What Might Have Been
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
As the 50th anniversary this November of the assassination of John F. Kennedy looms on the horizon, the debates over his legacy and presidency continue: a procession of “what ifs” and “might have beens,” accompanied by contradictory arguments, and informed and not-so-informed speculation. Would Kennedy have avoided Lyndon B. Johnson’s tragic escalation of the war in Vietnam? Would he have found a way to propel his stalled tax-cut bill and civil rights legislation through Congress and start a war on poverty, or was Johnson able to achieve these historic goals only through a combination of his bare-knuckled, tactical knowledge of Congress; his personal relationships on Capitol Hill; and his ability to use the momentum of sentiment generated by Kennedy’s death?
Several schools of argument have arisen. The former Kennedy speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen and the aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. focused on Kennedy’s record and the promise of his vision, creating a sort of bildungsroman portrait of the president, as learning and growing on the job.
Debunkers like Garry Wills and Seymour M. Hersh, by contrast, focused on the dark side of Camelot, suggesting that what they saw as Kennedy’s moral shortcomings and recklessness endangered the nation. More judicious and substantive accounts have been provided by Richard Reeves (“President Kennedy: Profile of Power”) and Robert Dallek (“An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963” ).
Thurston Clarke’s patchy and often reductive new book, “JFK’s Last Hundred Days,” draws heavily on the Dallek and Reeves books, while attempting to advance variations on arguments made by Sorensen and Schlesinger. Mr. Clarke contends that during that crucial period Kennedy was “finally beginning to realize his potential as a man and a president”; just as “ambition and realpolitik had characterized his congressional career and early White House years, morality and emotion tempered his ambitions during his last hundred days.”
Mr. Clarke also argues that during those days, Kennedy began to show his wife, Jacqueline, “the marriage they might have had,” arguing that the death of their premature infant, Patrick, in August 1963 had brought them closer together, and that he seemed to have curtailed his womanizing.
In Mr. Clarke’s view, two speeches the president gave in June 1963 — one proposing negotiations with Moscow to draft a nuclear test ban treaty, the other declaring that “race has no place in American life or law” — represented a turning point in his life, when he went from sailing with the winds of political expediency to embracing principle, as he described some of his heroes doing in “Profiles in Courage.”
Mr. Clarke made a similar argument about Robert F. Kennedy in his powerful 2008 book, “The Last Campaign,” writing that Robert appeared to begin that campaign as a homage to his brother but came into his own, speaking with an inspirational intensity and rawness rarely seen in politics about poverty, racial injustice and the country’s unhealed wounds. Others, too, have observed that the quick-tempered, hard-boiled Bobby — who’d worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the 1950s and who’d been a tough enforcer on Jack’s 1960 campaign — became a more introspective, empathetic man after his brother’s assassination; grief and a passion for fighting for the poor had changed him.
This new book, though, lacks the visceral immediacy of “The Last Campaign,” and Mr. Clarke is less persuasive making a case for Jack Kennedy’s transformation in the last months of his life.
The idea of transformation is deeply appealing: we live in a culture that prizes reinvention and second acts. With John F. Kennedy, however, it’s difficult to make a case for dramatic change or to suggest that in June 1963 “he finally began to be more Irish than Harvard, governing from the heart as well as the head.”
It’s difficult partly because, as Mr. Clarke points out, Kennedy was “one of the most complicated and enigmatic men ever to occupy the White House”: a man who compartmentalized different aspects of his life and who frequently said and did contradictory things. His most essential quality, the literary critic Alfred Kazin is quoted as saying, was “that of the man who is always making and remaking himself.”
Kennedy’s opinions, too, could appear to mutate swiftly, and could be read in numerous ways. Much of the debate over what Kennedy would have eventually done about Vietnam — find a way to extricate the United States or listen to the same hard-liners who would help persuade Johnson to escalate American involvement — stems from wildly divergent remarks he made on the subject, remarks subject to a variety of interpretations.
Mr. Clarke says that Kennedy delivered a response to the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite in early September 1963 that was calculated to “prepare Americans for the possibility that the war might be unwinnable.” In the final analysis, Kennedy said of the South Vietnamese government: “It is their war. They are the ones who have to win or lose it.”
A week later, during an interview with David Brinkley and Chet Huntley of NBC News, Kennedy declared that he believed in the domino theory (which held that if South Vietnam fell, the rest of Southeast Asia would go Communist, too), then concluded: “I think we should stay. We should use our influence in as effective a way as we can, but we should not withdraw.” Mr. Clarke contends that this statement “bore no more resemblance to his real intentions than Roosevelt’s pledge not to involve America in the Second World War did to his,” adding, “Kennedy wanted to placate hawks in the Pentagon and Congress, just as Roosevelt had wanted to placate the isolationists.”
In his 2003 biography, Mr. Dallek wrote that Kennedy’s actions and statements “are suggestive of a carefully managed stand-down from the sort of involvement that occurred under L.B.J.,” but also noted that “no one can prove, of course, what Kennedy would have” actually done.
Mr. Clarke gives us an often vivid portrait of Kennedy as an immensely complex human being: by turns detached and charismatic, a hard-nosed pol and a closet romantic, cautious in his decision making but reckless in his womanizing. His book, however, lacks the granular detail and sober, appraising eye of Mr. Dallek’s volume. Too often, Mr. Clarke seems to be cherry-picking details and anecdotes that support his overarching thesis — that Kennedy began to hit his stride in his last 100 days, starting to emerge as “a great president” — rather than carefully assessing the historical record.
Mr. Clarke focuses, speculatively, on what Kennedy planned to do, rather than on what he achieved, writing that, among other things, the president “intended to travel to Moscow for a summit meeting with Khrushchev; launch a secret dialogue with Castro; explore the possibility of establishing a relationship with China; withdraw a thousand advisers from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and remove more during 1964; settle the cold war; end the threat of a nuclear war; launch an attack on poverty; pass his tax cut, civil rights and immigration bills; preside over the most robust, full-employment economy in American history; and continue marrying poetry to power and inspiring the young.”
Mr. Clarke plays down, even dismisses, Johnson’s extraordinary legislative mojo in getting Kennedy’s stalled initiatives passed, making the debatable assertion that Kennedy “would have succeeded in getting a civil rights bill through Congress, but perhaps not until after the election” of 1964. He also writes that the Great Society, Johnson’s domestic legislative program, “was largely a compendium of Kennedy’s bills and initiatives.”
Such efforts by Mr. Clarke to inflate Kennedy’s achievements distract from his actual accomplishments and influence, and they also make this intermittently interesting volume feel like a sentimental work of hagiography.
JFK’S LAST HUNDRED DAYS
The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President
By Thurston Clarke
Illustrated. 432 pages. The Penguin Press. $29.95
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