JFK 1991 Movie Closing Arguments

[Dig]

It was a public execution, and it was covered up by...
...like-minded people in the Dallas Police...
...the Secret Service, the FBl, and the White House...
...up to and including J. Edgar Hoover, and Lyndon Johnson...
...who were accomplices after the fact.
The assassination reduced the President to a transient official.
His job is to speak as often as possible of the nation's desire for peace...
...while he acts as a business agent in the Congress...
...for the military and their contractors.

Some people say I'm crazy.
Southern caricature seeking higher office.
There's a simple way to determine if I am paranoid.
Ask the two men who profited most from the assassination...
...former President Johnson and your new President, Nixon...
...to release the 51 CIA documents pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby.
Or the secret CIA memo...
...on Oswald's activities in Russia that was destroyed while being photocopied.
These documents are yours.
The people's property. You pay for it.
But as the government sees you as children...
...who might be too disturbed to face this reality...
...or because you might lynch those involved...
...you cannot see these documents for another 75 years.
I'm in my 40's...
...so I'll have "shuffled off this mortal coil" by then.
But I'm telling my eight-year-old son to keep himself physically fit...
...so that one glorious September morning, in 2038...
...he can go to the National Archives and learn what the CIA and FBI knew.
They may push it back then.

It may become a generational affair. Questions passed from parent to child.
But someday, somewhere, someone may find out the damn truth.
We better.

Or we might just as well build ourselves another government...
...like the Declaration of Independence says to, when the old one don't work.

Just a bit farther out West.
An American naturalist wrote:
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country...
"...against its government."
I'd hate to be in your shoes today.

You have a lot to think about. You've seen evidence the public hasn't seen.
Going back to when we were children...
...I think most of us in this courtroom...
...thought justice came automatically.
 
That virtue was its own reward.
That good triumphs over evil.
But as we get older we know this isn't true.

Individual human beings have to create justice, and this is not easy...
...because the truth often poses a threat to power...
...and one often has to fight power at great risk to themselves.

People like S.M. Holland...
...Lee Bowers...
...Jean Hill, Willie O'Keefe...
...have all taken that risk and they've all come forward.

I have here some $8,000 in these letters...
...sent from all over the country.

Quarters, dimes, dollars from housewives...
...plumbers, car salesmen, teachers, invalids.

These are people who cannot afford to send money but do.

People who drive cabs...
...who nurse in hospitals...
...who see their kids go to Vietnam.

Why?
Because they care.
Because they want to know the truth.
Because they want their country back.

Because it still belongs to us...
...as long as the people have the guts to fight for what they believe in.

The truth is the most important value we have because if it doesn't endure...
...if the government murders truth...
...if we cannot respect these people...
...then this is not the country I was born in, or the country I want to die in.

Tennyson wrote:
"Authority forgets a dying king."
This was never more true than for John F. Kennedy...
...whose murder was probably one of the most terrible moments...
...in the history of our country.
We, the people, the jury system sitting in judgment on Clay Shaw...
...represent the hope...
...of humanity against government power.
In discharging your duty...
...to bring a first conviction in this house of cards...
...against Clay Shaw...
"...ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country."
Do not forget...
...your dying king.

Show this world...
...this is still a government "of the people, for the people and by the people."
Nothing as long as you live...
...will ever be more important.
It's up to you.

[Dig]

Definition of a Patsy
From JFK 1991

They have their man.
It's already been decided in Washington.
When he is brought from the theater...
...a crowd is waiting to scream at him.
Lee Oswald must have felt like Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial.
He's never given reasons for his arrest.
He doesn't know the unseen forces ranging against him.
At police headquarters, he was booked for murdering Tippet.
No legal counsel was provided.
No record made of the questioning.
When the sun rises the next morning...
...he is booked for murdering the President.
The whole country, fueled by the media, assumes he is guilty.
Under the guise of a patriotic club owner...
...out to spare Jackie Kennedy from testifying at a trial...
...Jack Ruby is let into a garage...
...by one of his inside men on the police force.
Oswald is brought out like a sacrificial lamb...
...and nicely disposed of as an enemy of the people.
Who grieves for Lee Harvey Oswald...
...buried in a cheap grave under the name Oswald?
Nobody.
False statements and press leaks about Oswald circulate the globe.
The official legend is created and the media takes it from there.
The glitter of official lies and the epic splendor of JFK's funeral...
...confuse the eye and confound the understanding.
Hitler said:
"The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it."
Lee Harvey Oswald, a crazed, lonely man who wanted attention...
...and got it by killing a President was only the first in a long line of patsies.
In later years, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King...
...men whose commitment to change and peace...
...made them dangerous to men committed to war, would follow...
...also killed by such lonely crazed men.
Men who remove all guilt by making murder a meaningless act of a loner.
We've all become Hamlets in our country, children of a slain father-leader...
...whose killers still possess the throne.
The ghost of John F. Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder...
...at the heart of the American Dream.
He forces on us the appalling questions: Of what is our Constitution made?
What are our lives worth?
What is the future of a democracy...
...where a President can be assassinated under suspicious circumstances...
...while the machinery of legal action scarcely trembles?

How many more political murders disguised as heart attacks...
...suicides, cancers, drug overdoses?

How many plane and car crashes will occur...
...before they are exposed for what they are?

"Treason doth never prosper," wrote an English poet.

"What's the reason?"

"For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

The American public has yet to see the Zapruder film.
Why?
The American public has yet to see the real X-rays and autopsy photographs.
Why?

Hundreds of documents could help prove this conspiracy.

Why are they being withheld or burned by the government?

When my office or you, the people, asked those questions, demanded evidence...
...the answer from on high has always been: national security.

What kind of national security do we have when we're robbed of our leaders?

What national security permits the removal...
...of fundamental power from the people...
...and validates the ascendancy of an invisible government in the US?

That kind of national security is...
...when it smells like it, feels like it, and looks like it...
...you call it what it is:
Fascism!

I submit to you that what took place on November 22, 1963...
...was a coup d'état.
Its most direct and tragic result...
...was the reversal of Kennedy's decision to withdraw from Vietnam.
The war is the biggest business in America...
...worth $80 billion a year.
President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy...
...planned at the highest levels of our government...
...carried out by fanatical and disciplined cold warriors...
...in the Pentagon and CIA's covert-operation apparatus.

[hal 9000]

JFK is on my top ten list of greatest movies of all time. Costner's closing summation to the jury that you have just quoted is spellbinding.