False Witness by Patricia Lambert

INTRODUCTION
UPROAR: FRAUD IN THE ARTS
    Who owns our “history”? He who makes it up so that most everyone believes it. 1
    â€”
Oliver Stone
, 1992
    One day in December 1988, Hollywood’s self-styled guerrilla filmmaker Oliver Stone was in Cuba, attending a Latin American film festival when he stepped onto an elevator in Havana’s old Nacional Hotel. There, an obscure New York publisher named Ellen Ray thrust a book into his hands. 2 The unlikely convergence of Ellen Ray and Oliver Stone in that Havana elevator would beget, three years later, the most controversial film ever created about an American historical event and provoke a thunderous media uproar that is unresolved even now. The cause of it all was the book Ray pressed upon Stone that day. It was
On the Trail of the Assassins
, the story of President Kennedy’s assassination as told by former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.
    Stone later told an interviewer that he had been doubtful about Ellen Ray at first, thinking she was just another “advocate of a cause.” But he took Garrison’s book with him to the Philippines where he was shooting
Born on the Fourth of July
. (Like
Platoon
, it excoriated the Vietnam War and it, too, would win an Academy Award.) Stone ended up reading the book three times.
    The relaxed and intimate first person narrative, which is almost seductively easy to read, described Garrison’s 1960s investigation and how he discovered the plot that had taken the president’s life. According to him, it was a CIA operation, with a contingent in New Orleans run by a local businessman named Clay Shaw, a prominent figure in the community and a closet homosexual. Arrested by Garrison on March 1, 1967, and charged with conspiring to murder the president,Shaw was the only individual ever tried for the crime. He was quickly acquitted, but Garrison blamed the verdict on a prosecution witness he said gave
lunatic testimony
on cross-examination and his own failure to establish Shaw’s connection with the CIA.
    Garrison told a plausible-sounding story that transported the crime from the narrow boundaries of Dealey Plaza to a larger, more appropriate stage; and he cast as villains an organization many Americans had come to believe was capable of anything. Assassination books tend to be grim and unreadable, but Garrison had written an interesting one. In the process, he transformed his prosecution of Clay Shaw, which the
New York Times
called “one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of American jurisprudence,” into a righteous enterprise.
    Stone later said he was “deeply moved and appalled” by Garrison’s story. Until then, he had thought little about the assassination and had accepted the conclusion of the Warren Report that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot the president. Garrison, Stone said, opened his eyes. It was through Garrison’s book that Stone first learned the “facts” of the case. More important was its Vietnam theme, Garrison’s claim that President Kennedy’s plan to withdraw from there triggered the assassination. For Stone, a twice-wounded Vietnam veteran, that war was the watershed experience of his adult life. In Garrison’s story, Stone had found his own personal Rosetta stone, an explanation for why he had ended up in the jungles of southeast Asia. He embraced it all as gospel. Over the next twenty-four months, he traveled to New Orleans three or four times each year, slipping into the city quietly and meeting secretly with Garrison. Like others before him, Stone fell under Garrison’s spell.
    â€œAnyone who has experienced the six-hour lecture from Garrison,” wrote columnist Max Lerner after a visit to Garrison’s home at the height of his assassination celebrity, “knows that, like a Merlin, he draws you into his never-never land world where everything is upside down, and you get the magical sense of a