Oliver Stone's "documentary" is a farce.

[MinM]

35. X - P = Richard Case Nagell

Some points of contention with the NYTimes critique from the op...

NYTimes - “JFK” was based on “On the Trail of the Assassins,” by Jim Garrison, a former Orleans Parish district attorney who, in 1969, unsuccessfully prosecuted Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, for conspiring to kill the president. Kevin Costner played Garrison as an Atticus Finch type fighting an ingrained power structure, though Garrison is dismissed by many mainstream historians as a con man. In researching “JFK,” Stone also relied on L. Fletcher Prouty, a former Air Force colonel who, before becoming disillusioned with government, was chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy administration. Prouty never actually met Garrison except in Stone’s film, where he is Donald Sutherland’s Colonel X, who lays it all out for the D.A. in the shadow of the Washington Monument — how the military deliberately underprotected the president in Dallas, how defense contractors, big oil and bankers conspired with the military to make sure the president died because he didn’t intend to go to war in Vietnam. Costner is a kind of stand-in for Stone, soberly shaking his head as X says: “Does that sound like a bunch of coincidences to you, Mr. Garrison? Not for one moment.”

In advance of the film’s release, Stone pronounced “JFK” “a history lesson.” Prouty, however, who died in 2001, turned out to be extremely problematic. He had many theories in addition to his theories on Kennedy, including that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had foreknowledge of the Jonestown Massacre and that greedy oil barons invented the fiction that oil is made of decomposed fossils. And it was Prouty, Stone said, who turned him on to “The Report From Iron Mountain,” a 1967 document ostensibly written by a secret panel of military planners. The document is a favorite among conspiracy theorists, who, like Prouty, seem unaware that in 1972 the satirist Leonard Lewin admitted he wrote it. “I’ve acknowledged when I’ve made mistakes,” Stone said of the movie now. “There were a few mistakes, but nothing that changes the big story.”

It has been more than 20 years since Stone made “JFK,” a film that he now says should be looked at not as history but as a dramatized version of it — “the spirit of the truth.” “It’s called dramatic license,” Stone said about his approach in “JFK.” ...

For one thing when Oliver Stone has spoken of "dramatic license" he talks about using composite characters like Donald Sutherland's Colonel X...

Zachary Sklar explains 25-minutes into this real audio clip, and the beginning of this one, that X is a composite character based on Nagell and Prouty. Specifically, an actual conversation that Jim Garrison had with Richard Case Nagell, while the rest of the character is fleshed out in the person of L. Fletcher Prouty.

So some of the more contentious comments in this scene actually came from Richard Case Nagell...

Of course that's an inconvenient detail the NYTimes does not deal with. Since they are eager to ascribe some type of foreknowledge to Prouty in other areas. They would rather keep people in the dark about the actual foreknowledge that Richard Case Nagell demonstrated with regard to the plot to kill Kennedy.

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