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Does Stone see himself as a political director? "Not at all," he says. "I am trying to be a dramatist." And a dramatist looks for a pattern. Coincidences, random motives and the privately festering grudges of a lone nut may be the small sad facts behind the Kennedy assassination, but they satisfy no one's demands -- least of all Stone's -- for the coherence of myth. The director needs a big-picture view to make his big picture work. And a hero like the movie's Garrison needs a martyr like the movie's Kennedy. The President must be restored to Camelot; the philanderer of revisionist history must be revised again, shown in home movies as a loving husband, a doting dad. More important, he must be a crusader who not only is determined to achieve his noble aims but also is aware of mortal danger from his enemies. If he was killed by Oswald alone, then Kennedy was no martyr -- just the victim of really rotten luck.
Stone argues that Kennedy was so progressive, so "soft on communism" (and on Castro) and so popular that the right-wing establishment was driven to kill him. But this is a romantic, perhaps fantasy, J.F.K.; he can as easily be seen as a cold warrior with star quality. He believed in the domino theory of communism storming across Asia; he exercised superpower machismo by eyeballing the Soviet Union over its Cuban missiles until Khrushchev blinked. He took flak from liberals for appointing segregationist Southerners as judges in federal courts. Martin Luther King Jr., not Kennedy, was the moral leader of the civil rights movement -- rights confirmed only in Lyndon Johnson's tenure.
Stone's Garrison is semifictional as well, and open to charges of distortion. As played with understated power by Costner, in his specs and rumpled jacket, Garrison is the ordinary decent man whose search for truth makes him extraordinary in a time of national fear and cowardice. Borrowing the quest plot from Hamlet (or Star Wars), JFK sends its hero out to avenge the murder of his spiritual father, Jack Kennedy. "This is not a biography of Jim Garrison," Costner says. "He was just the flagpole Oliver tied the events around. Was he right? I'm not sure. I tried to play him without judging him. That's somebody else's job. My job was to validate him as a character. It's up to the moviegoer to decide whether what he says is valid."
What wasn't valid, some supporters of conspiracy scenarios charge, was the real Garrison's tactics. In mythologizing the D.A., JFK ignores allegations that he bullied witnesses and suppressed a polygraph test. These moral zits would deface the hero's image -- and Stone's too, since he likely sees himself as a modern movie Garrison, a brave man vilified for unearthing the sordid, cleansing truth. If Stone wants to raise the Garrison flagpole and sit on it, waving elaborate theories as if they were the Stars and Stripes, fine. But he should make his method clear to the audience. JFK needs to carry the warning: This is a drama based on fact and conjecture.