MOVIE REVIEW: CALVARY (2014)

 

 

"IT'S A STORY ABOUT FORGIVENESS, change and renewal.

In the beginning, yes, Father James meets a series of unrelentingly awful people, all of whom he suspects of wanting to kill him. None of them are worthy of Father James' comfort and he chooses to abandon his vocation.

Except he realises that the millionaire Michael is simply hurting. When Father James recognises Michael's genuine pain and asks for forgiveness from his daughter, he realises again the importance of his life, work and the power of spirituality to bring comfort to those lost and seemingly damaged.

That is why he returns. And that is why Fiona seems ready to open up and at least listen to the murderer of her father.

The film argues that salvation and forgiveness is possible for even those who themselves believe that they have crossed a moral precipice. The murderer thinks that the church is beyond redemption and needs to be destroyed. Father James believed that people are beyond lost and need to be abandoned. The film argues that both views are wrong and it is only through change that we can begin to heal and stop hurting others (and ourselves).” (Sharaz__Jek)

 

 STATEMENT OF INTENTION

 

Sharaz__Jek, in the above Reddit column, provides us with a helpful synopsis of Calvary. And, here, I would only add a couple of points: Early in the movie, Father James Lavelle, a priest in the small town of Easkey in northwest Ireland, receives a parishioner’s confession. We don’t see who it is, but what he says is shocking, detailing how, as a child, he was sexually abused by his parish priest, whose crimes were never exposed. The parishioner has harboured a deep hatred and loathing for the Catholic church and its clergy since that time. Decades later, he yearns for revenge and announces in the confessional that he will kill Father James in one week. His is not a confession, it is a statement of intent. He chose Father James because he is a “good” priest, and his revenge would be more complete, in his eyes, because of that fact. The movie chronicles the last days of Father James’s life.

I CONFESS (no pun intended) that Calvary was a bit of a surprise. I thought I would be seeing the stereotypical Irish priest we are so accustomed to see on film—brusque, a bit of a tippler, having the gift of the gab, acts as a spiritual lighting rod, and is a solver of problems big and small within his parish. Father James, on the other hand, is a recovering alcoholic. He has come to his vocation late in life following the death of his wife. He has an adult daughter, Fiona, herself plagued by a life of bad choices and relationships, and she has recently attempted suicide. The two have been estranged for years, with Father James critical of her lifestyle and her attempts at suicide which, according to church teachings, is a mortal sin. Fiona visits James during this time hoping for a reconciliation between them. At one point she says his alcoholism during her childhood alienated her, as did his later vocation which proved a barrier rather than a bridge between them.

 

IN THE MOVIE, the dialogue is rich and the banter plentiful with humorous asides, quips and witticisms from the townspeople and Father James. But there is an element of malice beneath the words. The dialogues invariably tend toward criticism, veiled and demonstrable, or ridicule, disbelief even anger with, and disparaging assessments of, the Church and Father Jame’s vocation. These last days prove to be his Calvary. I agree with Sharaz when they say Father James has lost his vocation. By this point, he sees his parishioners as irredeemable; they will do what they will with their lives despite his advice, spiritual and otherwise, and there is little he can do to change their ways. His relationship with them has become pro forma, a perfunctory gesture, formulaic, futile. And they know it. Perhaps another way of putting it is that he has lost his love for his fellow man. One example of this is when he visits a deranged murderer in prison who says he wants to confess. After listening to him, Father James tells the killer that to make a genuine confession one must be truly contrite, something he deems lacking in the killer, who he leaves to his madness without performing the Confessional rite. However, it is shortly afterwards that he has a heart-felt talk with Fiona. They reconcile after he asks her to forgive him for not understanding—for not trying to understand—the depths of her despair and for not engaging with her when she needed him most— growing up and as a young adult. In an emotionally charged scene the two express their love for the other and Father James is heartbroken when she returns to Dublin.

The final straw that breaks him is an accusation that he was attempting to ‘groom’ a young girl he met on a walk to the beach. He is undone by this experience and falls into a deepening “dark night of the soul” with his spiritual life and the secular world around him never more at loggerheads. He goes to the village pub and begins drinking. The village doctor, an ardent atheist and perhaps the most “unrelentingly awful” of all the people Father James encounters, tells Father James a horrific tale of a young patient whose prognosis post-treatment is a "living hell". The priest is shattered and asks the doctor why would he tell him such a terrible story. The doctor doesn’t answer but the subtext is clear: What kind of God would make a child suffer so? How can you believe in such a God? There is no God.What say you to that, priest?  Enraged by yet another assault on his vocation and beliefs, Father James nearly attacks the doctor. Instead, he drinks far into the night, shoots-up the bar with a revolver*, and ends battered and bloodied in a brawl with the tavern keeper.

 

FORGIVENESS

   

THE NEXT DAY, he decides he will quit the priesthood and flee from his rendezvous with death. He drives to the regional airport for a flight to Dublin. There he meets the wife of a tourist who’d died in Easkey. Earlier in the week Father James had performed the Last Rites for him as he lay comatose in hospital. Accompanying her late-husband's coffin, she says she is taking her husband “home”. The young widow had a quiet dignity and unwavering faith in God and the Church, and as devastated as she was, nevertheless she says she will “keep going on”. As they talk, the two watch from inside the terminal as her husband’s coffin is loaded by baggage handlers into the plane's cargo hold like..well, baggage. The lack of reverence, of any regard for the transcendent in the modern world, the cold, secular world filled with cynics, skeptics, unbelievers, idolaters, and haters was encapsulated in that quiet scene at the airport.

 

INSPIRED by her faith and her will to persevere, Father James returns to Easkey to resume his pastoral duties. On the morning of his death, he phones Fiona to talk to her one last time. He says there has been too much talk of sin and not enough about virtue. Asked what he thought was the greatest virtue, he replies "forgiveness". Each then forgives the other and Father James leaves the rectory for the last time and walks to his final destination.

As he walks through town he encounters Gerald, the elderly American writer, who asks if he can join him on his walk. Father James says no, given what he is about to face. Gerald takes it as a rebuff and turns to walk away, but Father James asks him if he’s finished his book. Gerald says yes but he wasn’t sure if it was any good. Father James said it will be “extraordinary” and that Gerald was a very fine writer, cheering the old man greatly. As with Fiona, Father James gives solace and affirms the Gerald’s value and sanctity in the world. 

 

HE WALKS TO THE CLIFFS overlooking the wild Atlantic and tosses the gun away; he will go unarmed to meet his executioner. There, he encounters Michael, a wealthy banker who contemplates suicide because life has no meaning for him anymore. Father James consoles him, embracing him, and promises he will come by his home later to talk with him. Another soul is touched, another spirit lifted by the priest who has learned that his greatest goal is to honour others, to understand and accept who they are and to love them unconditionally.

 

FINALLY, he walks to the beach where we see a figure approaching. It is the town butcher, Jack Brennan. Here, I disagree with Sharez__Jek. I think Father James knew all along it was Jack who would come for him. It makes sense of some of the looks, venom, and veiled threats passing between the two in the days leading up to the priest’s murder. Father James tells Jack it’s not too late, that he doesn’t have to kill him. Jack disagrees saying it’s ordained, unstoppable. He's wrong, of course, there are always choices that can be made.The priest looks at Jack, refusing to look away as the butcher raises his revolver. Father James's gaze is open, accepting what will come and, at the same time, accepting Jack unconditionally, loving him even as Jack murders him. Jack cannot meet the priest's gaze and turns away as he pulls the trigger.

The movie ends with short depictions of the people whose lives Father James had touched. Most seem to be living much as before. It is with Fiona, Gerald, Michael, the young altar boy who witnesses the shooting and, perhaps, Jack that moments  of grace are achieved.¹

 

The final scene is of Fiona visiting Jack in prison. She is seated in the glassed-off booth with a phone link prisoners use to talk with their visitors. She is calm, her gaze is tearful, and like her father’s, it is open, accepting. She will listen to him without reservation. Jack is terrified of her, barely able to approach the booth and sit. (I had the image of a devil, brought from the dark depths to the surface, blinded by the light of a world he had long ago abandoned.) What frightens Jack the most, I think, is he knows she will forgive his unforgivable act. And then where will he be? What will he be? The road to redemption is always there even if it can be a difficult and rocky one.

 

MY APOLOGIES for the length of this review. I kept trying to describe the movie (some gorgeous scenery, BTW). I could have simply said it’s a good watch, all-in-all.

 

CHEERS, JAKE.

_____________________________________ 

 

* At the beginning of the movie, Father James drops off some groceries to Gerald Ryan, an elderly American novelist who is writing a book in a cottage near town. He asks Father James for a gun with the unspoken purpose of using it to end his life if he were to become disabled. Father James said he would try to get him one. He does but, instead, keeps the revolver. He clearly means to keep it for self-protection against his would-be assassin.  Which is why he had a gun with him at the pub. 

👉It also reminds the viewer that Father James is on his own spiritual journey. He is human, with all the fralities and faults that entails. On his late night drive back from the airport he accepts the fact that he will face his own Golgotha the next day and he quietly prepares for whatever is to come.

 

1. Not everyone in town is changed by their relationship with Father James. Not everyone accepts or seeks unconditional love or expresses it. Moments of grace, the film tells us, are few and far between in life; they should be cherished and encouraged whenever they occur.

 

👉For GoT fans: Doctor Frank Harte (a misnomer if ever there ever was one), who believes in the sanctity of no one, is a cold and heartless character. An ending tableau after Father James’s murder has the good doctor standing in an autopsy room. He is smoking a cigarette. There is a stainless-steel bowl on the counter in front of him containing what looks like a human heart and upon which he butts out his cigarette. He is someone you’d like to punch in his stupid face, if truth be told.

But FYI, the actor portraying Dr. Harte played Littlefinger in GoT, also someone you’d like to punch in the face.

 

P.S. I just had an annoying thought: Are we to assume the heart is Father James’s?  Conceivably the priest could have been autospied in Easkey by Dr. Harte who sees human beings as machines that eventually break down, no more, no less. And no matter how he might ‘excavate’ Father James’s body, he will never encounter the priest's soul, nor come to regard his own.

 

 

P.P.S. A nice touch in the film is this landscape shot of Father James's altar boy painting the seascape in the moments before the priest is murdered. While Jack strides along the beach to meet his fate, Father James simply waits. The boy's painting is unfinished, the future is open, the last dab of colour has yet to be applied, if at all. Free will and choice are always at play; nothing is pre-ordained as Jack believes.
 

 

 

WARNING: RABBIT HOLES AHEAD!

 

I’VE BEEN READING about the 1963 assassination of the American president, John Kennedy, and to read anything that goes beyond the Warren Commission conclusions of 1964 or the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) findings, which also reviewed the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, or the released files from 1992’s Assassination Records Review Board and subsequent releases, is to step into any number of rabbit holes. The big one, of course: did Oswald act alone or was there a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy? On that point, the jury is still out, but 2007’s JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglass outlines a scenario in which Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed the “patsy” he claimed to be when shouting to reporters as he was brought into custody by Dallas police. Douglass suggests the CIA or rogue Deep State elements used a “fake” Oswald to ‘place’ the hapless Oswald in key locations before and after the assassination so police could track and presumably shoot and kill him, making for a tidy end to any investigation. For example, Douglass reports that “fake” Oswald was seen getting into a station wagon outside the Texas School Book Depository and less than a half-hour later was observed several miles from Dealy Plaza, just blocks from the Texas Theatre (where patsy real-Oswald was captured). Did “fake” Oswald shoot and kill police officer J.D. Tippet before fleeing on foot to the theatre? Did real-Oswald make the journey from Dealy Plaza by bus and cab? What about the Oswald seen getting into a station wagon minutes after the assassination? Was it a case of mistaken identity by witnesses or evidence of a conspiracy?

The movie theatre may have been a rendezvous point given to Oswald by his ‘handlers’. And so, fake-Oswald fades from the scene while real-Oswald awaits his impending arrest inside the movie theatre. Douglass suggests the desired scenario envisioned by the Deep State actors was for Oswald to be killed by the police following the murder of their fellow officer. Real-Oswald was armed with a handgun and initially resisted arrest, so by not shooting Oswald, the Dallas police may have inadvertently foiled the carefully constructed plot of the planners.

    Real or Fake?

IT SHOULD BE NOTED that the forensic evidence around the handgun found in Oswald’s possession was not entirely conclusive. Interestingly, in his book, On the Trail of the Assassins, New Orleans’ District Attorney Jim Garrison—who in 1969 unsuccessfully prosecuted businessman Clay Shaw for conspiring in the murder of President Kennedy—accuses Dallas police of mishandling the forensic analysis of handgun. In fact, Garrison says real-Oswald did not shoot Tibbit.

 

🐇THAT’S JUST A TASTE of the rabbit holes surrounding the Kennedy assassination.  I should say that I found such a conspiracy as Douglass envisions unwieldy, with too much that could go wrong. Such a plan would entail a rigorous timetable, for example, having fake-Oswald shoot Tibbit, flee on foot to the Texas Theatre, be seen entering, then vanish before the police arrived, leaving real-Oswald inside the movie house holding the bag. It seems way too complicated, with too many things that could go wrong. Note: from the time Kennedy was killed to when Oswald was arrested was just over 1½ hours. 

He or his double was seen on the sixth floor of the Book Depository before the three shots were apparently fired from at Kennedy's motorcade. However, real-Oswald was seen in a lower floor cafeteria minutes after the shooting, having somehow gotten there via stairs where he would have been seen by co-workers. So, does that mean real-Oswald had been in the cafeteria during the shooting? It's an intriguing possibility.  He was seen waiting for a bus near the Depository shortly after the assassination. The driver of the cab he later hailed identified real-Oswald as his passenger. Later, he was seen entering the Texas Theatre. There were numerous witnesses that day, but one wonders what they truly saw. Or heard. Or understood what their senses told them. An audio recording taken from a police motorcycle radio at the scene seems to capture the sound of four shots being fired. But, only some witnesses along the parade route recall hearing four shots.

 

🐇 WAS THERE A CONSPIRACY or is that pure fantasy? Was Oswald the lone gunman or the fall guy? The Warren Commission investigating Kennedy’s assassination, in tracking Oswald’s movements in the weeks and months before he got a job* at the Book Depository, concludes:

 

“[T]he Committee agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald had visited Mexico City and concluded that "the majority of evidence tends to indicate" that Oswald visited the consulates, but the Committee could not rule out the possibility that someone else had used his name in visiting the consulates.” 

(Wikipedia) [italics mine]

 

The above HSCA quote refers to an October 1963 visit that (real or fake) Oswald made to Mexico City to obtain travel visas for his family to travel to Cuba and the USSR. Was this Oswald? And if it was someone impersonating him, as Douglass writes and as members of both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations speculate, then the “lone gunman” thesis gets tossed out the window.

Additionally, in 1992, the newly formed Assassination Records Review Board (AARB) which collated the Kennedy files held by various agencies, also suggests the possibility of a conspiracy:

 

“In 1992, following popular political pressure in the wake of the film JFK, the ARRB…was created by the “JFK Records Act” to collect and preserve the documents relating to the assassination. In a footnote in its final report, the ARRB wrote: "Doubts about the Warren Commission's findings were not restricted to ordinary Americans. Well before 1978, President Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, and four of the seven members of the Warren Commission all articulated, if sometimes off the record, some level of skepticism about the Commission's basic findings." (Wikipedia) ¹

 

Even President Johnson, Kennedy’s successor as Vice President, in a post-presidential interview with CBS News, told Walter Cronkite he had never been convinced that a lone gunman killed Kennedy. And while I’m not entirely convinced by Douglass’s “fake Oswald" scenario, there are other suggestive observations he makes that do indeed point to a conspiracy.

🐇 FOR EXAMPLE, Oswald seems to have had contact or interactions of some sort with the CIA (and FBI) beginning in the mid-1950s. What's up with that? 

[Incidentally, he was only 24 when Jack Ruby murdered him on live television, two days after Kennedy's assassination. And Ruby's motivations and involvement in all this is another rabbit hole that will suck you right in. Beware! Ed.]

 

Oswald was born in New Orleans in 1939 and grew up there and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was characterized as a loner by those who knew him, a troubled teen with a spotty high school record, though he did read voraciously.  At 17 he joined the U.S. Marines and was stationed in Mississippi where he studied radar and aircraft surveillance systems and was, incidentally, an above average marksman. In 1957 he was transferred to the Naval Air Facility Atsugi, near Tokyo, Japan. This was the base where the CIA operated its U-2 spy plane missions over the Soviet Union. It is conceivable that Oswald acquired important, classified signals information on U-2 flight patterns and operation specs, after all he had a security clearance to access “sensitive” information in the performance of his job. He was in Japan for over 1½ years, then transferred to California, again as a radar operator, when he resigned his position in 1959. That year he defected to the USSR. Douglass speculates that the information he possessed on U-2 flight operations contributed to the famous May 1 downing of Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane over the USSR in 1960 and his capture by Soviet authorities. As an aside: the revelations of American spying operations inside the USSR scuttled the upcoming Nuclear Arms Control talks between the U.S. and the USSR that were scheduled to be held later that spring in Geneva, and from which an angry Chairman Khrushchev withdrew. It was only in the last months of his presidency, in the fall of 1963, that Kennedy was able to ink the Nuclear Test Ban treaty, the first one of its kind, with the USSR's Khrushchev. 

Riddle me this: Who might benefit from sinking the upcoming summit? Hint: the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) and cold warriors on both sides. Oswald may have been instrumental in this outcome.

🐇 ANOTHER PUZZLE is how easily he returns to the United States in 1962 with his new Russian wife and young daughter, after their ship docked in New York. Recall that he had previously renounced his U.S. citizenship when he entered the USSR in 1959. He may have left the United States with information on classified radar technology, and spent two years in the USSR, yet upon his return, American security agencies apparently had no interest in him. He was allowed to return and there were no red flags on his file. Why? Douglass speculates Oswald was a CIA asset and that he was involved in a “double agent” confabulation. His defection to the USSR was seemingly genuine, so much so that he was recruited by the KGB, Douglass continues, to return home to the U.S. and to spy for them. Was Oswald part of a CIA covert operation and his embrace of communism and the Soviet Union merely a ruse? Reading Douglass’s book gives the reader the impression that the CIA and FBI were around Oswald like a bad smell.

 

IT’S ALSO INTERESTING to note the number of people in Lee and Marina Oswald's lives with CIA connections. For example, the Traveler's Aid Society volunteer worker, a Bulgarian émigré and academic named Spas T. Rankin, who assisted and met the Oswalds upon their arrival in New York in 1962, belonged to organizations with known CIA ties. When Oswald and his pregnant wife moved to Dallas in early 1963, they were assisted by the flamboyant oil industry executive George de Mohrenschildt who had even more CIA connections than Rankin. The Russian-born de Mohrenschildt was part of the “White Russian” (i.e. anti-communist/USSR) émigré community in Dallas that took care of the newly arrived Oswalds, seeing to their living arrangements and finding work for Lee.

Ruth Paine and her husband Michael aided Oswald and his wife in Dallas. And Ruth, a Quaker, shared her home with Marina and her two young children in early 1963 when Lee was in New Orleans looking for work. [Warning! there's a major rabbit hole in Oswald's stay in the "Big Easy"! Ed.]. She also found Oswald a job at the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald’s sixth-floor “sniper’s nest” was located.² It should be noted that Ruth had family members working at the CIA and Michael’s family had similar familial connections to the spy agency. So, the question: Were Ruth and Michael CIA “assets”, used from time to time by the agency? Were they ‘handlers’ of Oswald, used to support him as he was shunted from one set of “spooks” to the next, bringing him ever-closer to Kennedy’s orbit and that fatal day in November of 1963?

🐇 JUST ONE MORE ODDITY in this complex story that I’ll mention (there are many more!) was Oswald’s apparent trip in late September 1963 to Mexico City where someone identifying themselves as “Lee H. Oswald” contacted both the Soviet and Cuban Embassies trying to get visas to travel to Cuba and then to the USSR. Did real-Oswald spend a week in Mexico City as part of a plan to flee Dallas following the assassination or was fake-Oswald attempting to link real-Oswald’s future crime to Cuban or Soviet origins. Recall, there was considerable animosity toward the Soviet Union and communist Cuba at the time, and a war with Cuba or even the USSR would suit the MIC agendas of war profiteering and global hegemony. And Kennedy was seen as an impediment to such plans. The president was becoming a roadblock the Deep State needed to get around. THE THESIS of a “fake” Oswald in Mexico City is more convincing to me than the Dallas or New Orleans³ fakes. Author James Douglass suggests there may be evidence that it was not Oswald who visited those two embassies in Mexico. I envision a cabal of intel/military/state department plotters debating and deciding to load onto their Oswald narrative—that he was a loner, a communist sympathizer, anti-Kennedy—the blame for the assassination with the Cubans or Soviets as the main perps, and Oswald being merely their 'hired gun'. Spooks like to have things nicely tied up in a bow, in this case after the assassination there was to be a dead Oswald, and the Soviets or Cubans fingered as the brains behind the operation. 

[One thing the Warren Commission shied away from was making any connection between Kennedy's death and the USSR, something that might prove dangerous, in terms of escalation and heating up the cold war. If the Deep State actors who planned and plotted Kennedy's assassination couldn't have Russia or Cuba blamed as the brains behind the operation, at least they could have a dead-end to the investigation with Oswald out of the picture. Ed.]

 

HONESTLY, I like the idea that Oswald was a bamboozled innocent, led around by spook handlers and set up as the fall guy. That he was not the assassin, as James Douglass proposes; that he did not fire on Kennedy’s motorcade that day; that he didn’t hate Kennedy; that he was following orders by unknown persons to be at the Book Depository then to go to the Texas Theatre; that he didn’t murder Officer Tibbit⁴ along the way. Was Lee Oswald tricked into believing he was on some other kind of mission—perhaps even to save Kennedy?  Recall, the under-reported story about a Chicago assassination plot, just weeks before Kennedy's fateful Dallas tour, that was foiled when a man telephoned authorities, identifying himself as “Lee” and warned of the murderous plot set for Kennedy’s November 2 visit to the city. The Secret Service cancelled Kennedy’s trip based on what they, the FBI and the police uncovered in their investigations. Oswald as "a patsy" is a compelling narrative. And if Kennedy was killed by unidentified gunmen, then a big bull’s eye was painted on Oswald at the same time.

 

🐇 So, was Oswald the lone gunman? Did he fire those three fateful bullets into Kennedy’s motorcade? Perhaps. Was there a fourth bullet fired by someone else from the infamous “grassy knoll”? Possibly. But, it is unlikely we’ll ever know for sure, even when the last tranche of Kennedy files is released (if ever). But the documented instances of spooks in Oswald’s life—for years—suggests he was an “asset” of the spy agencies, available for use by rogue elements as they plotted to assassinate their president and pin the blame on other actors. (Russia, Cuba, Cuban exiles, "the mob")  Conspiracy or fact? The jury’s still out.      

 

Cheers, Jake. ___________________________________________

 

* Ruth Paine is credited for getting Oswald a job at the Texas School Book Depository in early October. Conspiracy critics say that neither Paine nor Oswald would have known that Kennedy's motorcade route would run through Dealy Plaza, where the limousine  needed to slow down negotiating a sharp left-hand turn. Critics say that travel plans for Kennedy's entourage had not even been made at that point. But if it had been planned, perhaps months earlier by the Secret Service (which is tasked with presidential security), then leaks of the parade route must have come from them or from Dallas authorities who would have been in the loop. That information would then have been passed on to Ruth Paine who secured Oswald's position at the Book Depository giving him an ideal spot to construct his "sniper's nest" on the sixth-floor. 

Note: Ruth may not have known the reason she was tasked with getting Oswald a job there. She, like Oswald, may have been "useful idiot" moved about the chessboard by hidden actors.

  

1. The ARRB released a tranche of previously redacted Kennedy assassination files in 1992, holding back a final batch for another 25 years until 2017 when President Trump allowed the release of 19,000 files. However, there remains an undetermined number of files still locked away. Though Trump promised to release all the Kennedy files, he changed his mind, holding back those deemed “too sensitive” to national security. He ordered the release of the remaining files be made in 2021. The Biden administration released an additional 13,000 files, leaving roughly 5,000 in the vault, again for ‘national security’ purposes. What is in the remaining files and when will they be released is anyone’s guess.     

 

2. For another twist down this rabbit hole, note that there was a little-reported earlier assassination plot. Douglass provides information that on Kennedy’s upcoming tour of Chicago on November 2, four Cuban exiles (who hated Kennedy because of his decision not to send U.S. forces into Cuba following the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion) were planning to murder him as he rode in his motorcade along the proposed parade route into the city. A tip from someone calling himself “Lee” alerted authorities to the plot, but the Secret Service, along with the police and FBI managed let the gunmen ‘slip’ through their fingers. It is also interesting that one Thomas Valee, an unstable “loner” and brain-damaged Korean War vet who publicly threatened to kill Kennedy in the weeks prior to the president's scheduled visit to the Windy City, was on hand. Valee, a skilled marksman, seemed like strong “patsy”  material in a  situation mirroring the one Oswald found himself in Dallas a few weeks later.

 

3. OMG! Don’t get me started on Oswald’s time in New Orleans where he was ostensibly looking for work. There were so many spooks floating around that it was hard to walk down a sidewalk without tripping over one! Mega rabbit hole! Or the rushed autopsy at  Parkland Memorial Hospital, the missing notes taken by medical staff at the time observing and recording the injuries Kennedy sustained. 

Or, how come the Dallas police, in two days of interviewing Oswald, took no notes or kept no audio recordings of their conversations with the man at the centre of one of the great crimes of the Twentieth-Century. WTF!? YGTBKM!! 🤯

 

4. Officer Tibbit was shot when he attempted to question Oswald (real or otherwise) because he fit the description in a police BOLO (“be on the lookout”) following Kennedy’s murder.  

 

👉FOR A SHARP BIT of political satire see Seinfeld’s classic spoof of the “single bullet” theory (dubbed by skeptics the “magic bullet”) that made its way into the 1964 Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of President Kennedy. The NBC comedy sketch was aired February 12, 1992, in an episode entitled “The Boyfriend”. The scene features actor Wayne Knight (“Newman!”) who’d also appeared in the movie JFK, directed by Oliver Stone, a year earlier. The Seinfeld TV episode spoofs the movie’s courtroom re-enactment of the Kennedy shooting which called into question the veracity of the “single bullet” theory. Instead of a bullet, the Seinfeld skit centers around the impossible gyrations of "one magic loogie!"  😆

In 1964, the Warren Commission adopted the “single bullet” scenerio in its deliberations which concluded that John Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally were struck by the same bullet. This fits the scenario of Lee Oswald having fired three bullets from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, Texas, killing the president and wounding Connally, and where three empty shell casings were found. Evidence of a fourth bullet fired at the presidential motorcade would suggest there was a second shooter and a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. [The “single bullet” hypothesis is one of the most controversial findings of the Warren Report and remains contested to this day. Ed.]   

SEINFELD EPISODE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl-Qp8RPOtI

OLIVER STONE’S JFK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwFIOPMBzqI If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, check out the courtroom scene near the end where District Attorney for New Orleans Jim Garrison (portrayed by Kevin Costner) demonstrates to the jury the likelihood there was more than one shooter in the Kennedy assassination by debunking the "magic bullet"/lone shooter narrative. The 1991 movie is based on Garrison’s real-life probing into the dark truths surrounding the 1963 assassination.

IN 1969, Garrison brought an unsuccessful court action against businessman Clay Shaw, claiming he was part of a conspiracy to murder the American president. The movie, JFK, is based on his investigations and follows the twists and turns Garrison and his prosecution team make going down what is arguably last century’s most audacious rabbit hole.

 

THE MOVIE, EXECUTIVE ACTION: is a fictional account of Kennedy’s assassination from the perspective of a cabal of wealthy elites who saw the president as a threat to their power and affluence and conspired to murder him. The 1973 film has a great cast: Robert Ryan, Burt Lancaster, and Will Geer, as well as an edgy and unrelenting portrayal of one of the most heinous crimes ever committed in the United States.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK2jxL7SBf4&t=29s

 

👉I've already suggested who I feel planned and orchestrated Kennedy's murder, here. Just how much Oswald knew and what actions he took in Dallas that fall day in 1963 have yet to be conclusively determined. He may have fired those three bullets including the "magic bullet", and later killed Officer Tibbit. There may or may not have been a second shooter. But, there most probably was a wider conspiracy behind it all. 

 

 

Douglass, James, W. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he Died and Why it Matters. Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2008.