A lot of Jacobin readers probably aren’t aware that your 1991 film JFK inspired a far-reaching act of Congress, helping to declassify thousands of national security records. Could you tell us about that legislation and how it was able to pry so many secret national security documents out of government hands?
It was called the Assassination Records Collection Act. Basically, there were no exceptions allowed, except for dire cases of national security, as far as I understand. But it was never enforced. Congress had no mechanism to enforce it. The ARRB ran out of funds by 1997 or ’98 and it was closed down. There was no continuation, no mechanism to continue. In which case the CIA takes over and it doesn’t do anything. They rejected everything that was asked of them.
To the best of your knowledge, has there ever been another Hollywood movie that inspired federal legislation?
Not that I know of.
What was it like, once again, testifying before Congress about the JFK assassination?
Rip Van Winkle. I woke up after thirty years and here I am again, same thing basically. Frankly, my interpretation is that they never absorbed the facts of the Warren Commission. There are numerous things the Warren Commission said — we’re talking about a thousand different things. There are lots of different clues out there, they’re in different places. It takes a computer or a Sherlock Holmes to bring all those facts into one space. If that were done, by a language model for a gigantic computer to put all this together, then people could understand.
First, the lack of original evidence — the chain of custody was broken on rifles and bullets. Meaning, from the beginning there is no case. I added [in the 2021 documentary JFK Revisited] the three women who didn’t see Oswald [in the Texas School Book Depository Building from which he supposedly fired shots at President Kennedy], as well as the fingerprints of intelligence all over Oswald for so many years. It’s very disturbing to anybody who’s sane, who follows these things and knows how the government works. Why do you turn over Oswald’s 201 File [an Official Military Personnel File] to [CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus] Angleton, and he sits on it forever? You tell me.
I think the most interesting piece of testimony I gave was actually anecdotal. At the end I mentioned the Angleton story, he was quoted as saying — he was a Catholic and apparently had some kind of sense of guilt — he said he was there with all the founders [of the CIA], he knew them very well, [Allen] Dulles and [Richard] Helms. He said, “They were all going to meet up in hell again.”
