Filmmaker Oliver Stone called on Congress to fully reinvestigate the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, following the Trump administration’s release of newly declassified JFK documents last month.
Stone, who directed the award-winning 1991 film JFK, made the comments on Tuesday while testifying before the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets in the House of Representatives.
He argued that past efforts like the 1964 Warren Commission had not done their job properly
“Reopen what the Warren Commission failed miserably to complete,” Stone said. “I ask you in good faith, outside all political consideration, to reinvestigate the assassination of this President Kennedy.”
Stone claimed the commission, created by Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson and chaired by then-Chief Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, “got us to second base, with a lot of unknowns.”
The 1964 effort concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting the president and was not involved in any conspiracy, a finding that’s been hotly debated ever since.
The director argued on Tuesday that there remained inconsistencies and new facts to be disclosed on issues like Kennedy’s autopsy and the chain of custody around Oswald, a 24-year-old former Marine, who was killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby two days after his arrest.
Elsewhere in the hearing, JFK researcher and former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley said the Trump administration’s release of the documents, which didn’t include about two-thirds of withheld documents that researchers hoped would be made public, nonetheless contained “disturbing new revelations” that top officers at the Central Intelligence Agency were “culpable or complicit” in Kennedy’s death.
“I did not start with a conspiracy theory and I did not go looking for a smoking gun,” Morley testified. “I started with an open mind and looked for a fact pattern.”
Documents show that officials, including the CIA’s then-director Richard Helms, counterintelligence chief James Angleton, and Miami-based CIA officer George Joannides, misled investigators about the extent of the agency’s awareness and contacts with Oswald in the run-up to the assassination.
“Three false statements by top CIA officers about Kennedy’s accused killer. That is a pattern,” Morley said. “It’s a pattern of misconduct. It's a pattern of malfeasance.”
He called on the CIA to release Joannides’s full personnel file, and asked that the congressional committee ask the intelligence agency why it would “lie to the JFK investigators.”
The Independent has contacted the CIA for comment.
The government has investigated the JFK assassination and records surrounding the killing multiple times, including through the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, and the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s.
