Executive Action

Directed by David Miller (1973)

Film Review

Until three days ago, I had no idea this film existed. I find it extraordinary that only 10 years after Kennedy’s murder, a major Hollywood studio publicly disclosed that the alleged perpetrator Lee Harvey Oswald was a known intelligence and FBI asset.

Based on a book of the same name by Mark Lane* and Donald Freed, the film was promoted as “fiction” incorporating “historical documented fact.” It depicts an eminently plausible scenario in which a network of business interests, rogue intelligence agents and sharpshooters conspire to kill President John F Kennedy.

In one scene, the conspirators review actual documents from Oswald’s military record revealing steps the CIA took (including training him in Russian) to create a suitable cover story to embed him in the Soviet Union as a double agent. Despite his dramatic renunciation of US citizenship at the US Embassy in Moscow (and his promise to turn over classified military secrets), the Russians refused to bite. The conspirators then review how his handlers returned him to the US, first to New Orleans, then to Dallas where they find him a job at the Texas School Book Depository and pay him a small stipend as an FBI informant.

Other “documented fact” presented in the film include the absence of Kennedy’s entire cabinet from the US, except for Lyndon Johnson (who was with him in Dallas), Robert McNamara (secretary of defense) and Robert Kennedy (attorney in general). On November 22, 1963, the rest were airborne on their way to a major conference in Japan. The filmmakers also point out that the emergency code book mysteriously disappeared from their plane, that all phone lines were down in Washington DC in the hour following the shooting and that neither the secret service nor the Dallas police failed followed required procedures in safeguarding the president’s motorcade.

The film depicts three shooters (none of them Oswald), one each in the School Book Depository, the Records Building across the street and on the Grassy Knoll in front of the motorcade.

The primary “fictional” component of the film is the identity of the conspirators. I was surprised it presented no evidence from New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison’s 1967 prosecution of JFK assassination co-conspirator Clay Shaw.  During Shaw’s trial, Garrison presented extensive evidence about the role Permindex* (responsible for numerous assassination attempts on late French president Charles De Gaulle) played in financing and orchestrating the assassination.

The film loosely portrays Kennedy’s killers as eugenicists keen on reducing the global population of dark skinned people, who are also deeply unhappy about the global nuclear test ban treaty, as well the president’s decision to withdraw all US troops from Vietnam by 1965.

There’s great archival footage of some of Kennedy’s more memorable speeches and Oswald’s interactions with reporters while in police custody. Claiming to be a “patsy,” Oswald insists he never killed anyone (neither the president nor police officer J D Tippett). Oswald was officially arrested and charged for murdering Tippett.

The film ends by scrolling through the names of 18 material witnesses (to the assassination) who died under mysterious circumstances between November 1963 and February 1967.

*Lane is best known for his number one bestselling 1966 critique of the Warren Commission report Rush to Judgement.

*Permindex, also referred to as Permanent Industrial Exposition or Permanent Industrial Expositions, was a trade organization French intelligence identified as orchestrating numerous assassination attempts on De Gaulle, as well as the successful assassination of John F Kennedy and numerous other world leaders.