The assassination of John F. Kennedy has been in the news recently. There was the tragic death of John F. Kennedy, Jr. in July, which brought back memories of the President’s funeral. Then there was the "just compensation" argument between the Zapruder family and the National Archives over the monetary value of the 26-second clip of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The heirs of Abraham Zapruder, who captured the moments of the assassination with a home movie camera, wanted $30 million for the film. The National Archives, which has stored the film in a special light- and temperature-controlled vault since the 1970s, offered $1 million. On August 3, 1999, arbitrators declared that the government must pay the Zapruder heirs $16 million for the film. The family retains the copyright and has already made a small fortune from selling videos of the assassination for $19.95. Also in August, KGB and Soviet diplomatic documents, which President Boris Yeltsin provided to President Clinton a few months ago, were translated and became public at the National Archives. The papers disclosed that just days after her husband’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy made private pleas to Soviet leaders to keep peaceful U.S. relations. The papers reveal details about the reactions of the Soviets.
At the beginning of September, it was announced that Vasili Mitrokhin, who worked for more than a decade in the KGB’s top-secret archives, had turned over six trunkloads of notes and copied archive material exposing the KGB’s espionage activities against the West during the Cold War. A new book, "The Sword and the Shield," by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin is to be published by Basic Books later this month. The archive material includes evidence of the KGB’s plan to link the CIA to the Kennedy assassination. In the 1970s the KGB forged a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald implicating the CIA in a plot to kill Kennedy. The letter was then anonymously sent to three conspiracy buffs and became part of the assassination myth.
The Zapruder film clip was first publicly shown during District Attorney Jim Garrison’s prosecution of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw. Garrison had charged that Shaw was part of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Although Shaw was acquitted, Oliver Stone believed Garrison’s theories and based his movie "JFK" on Garrison and his conspiracy charges. Stone could not recreate the "puff of smoke" from the grassy knoll from a rifle and so used a bellows to create enough smoke to be seen. The controversy and allegations of government involvement in a plot to kill President Kennedy that followed the movie led Congress to pass the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The Act required the Assassination Records Review Board to gather and make public all documents relating to President Kennedy’s death. The Zapruder film was "taken" by the government in August 1998 and the appraisal controversy ensued.
Jim Garrison, who was the hero of "JFK," was discharged from the National Guard in 1952 after army doctors diagnosed him with a "severe and disabling psychoneurosis." He spent much of his career trying to prove that Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, and the FBI conspired to kill President Kennedy. Oliver Stone embraced the theory that Kennedy was assassinated to prevent Kennedy’s planned withdrawal from Vietnam. The movie did not disclose actual details from the Shaw trail. One of the witnesses against Shaw was Charles Spiesel. Unfortunately for Garrison’s case against Shaw, during cross-examination, Spiesel disclosed that his psychiatrist and the police were conspiring to control his thoughts and that he required identifying fingerprints each time his daughter came home from college. The movie was attacked by most scholars as a paranoid distortion of the truth, but unfortunately many viewers came away believing that they had been shown the truth about the assassination of President Kennedy.