Power in Oliver Stone's JFK

There has been no shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of President Kennedy, which continues to inspire passionate discussions and powerful emotions. An investigation of one conspiracy theory, as presented in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), provides the viewer with a power structure in motion that flexes its muscles against even the most prominent politician. The collection of actors investigated by District Attorney Jim Garrison displays themes consistent with Foucault’s writing on power. By looking at three scenes from the film, the project turns now to presenting power as a crisis – a crisis of identity, of oneness, and of autonomy. These crises will become apparent by a viewing of Garrison’s team as they discuss multiple “Oswalds,” the rampant paranoia displayed by David Ferrie, and finally the discussion between Garrison and “X” on black operations. These scenes, characterized together as crises of unity with special consideration for their narrative implications, render Foucault’s decentralized power accessible.

Scene 36, “More than one Oswald,” recounts the lengthy development of Oswald as the perfect fall guy. By piecing together the testimonies of witnesses, government documents, and the Warren Report, the team of investigators see Oswald’s narrative as one carefully planned and executed by a power structure beyond Oswald’s perception and control. Susie Cox, part of Garrison’s team, explains that “starting in September’63 on, two months before the assassination, there are sightings of Oswald all over Dallas.” She gives three examples of noteworthy sightings. First, someone using the name Oswald test drives a car before informing the salesman that “no honest working man can afford to buy a car in this goddam country anymore. Maybe I’ll have to go to Russia to buy a car.” Cox informs the team that this car salesman remembered Oswald as being 5’7” tall, though his draft card lists him as being 5’11.” She continues to describe an incident wherein Oswald was introduced to a Cuban woman working in the anti-Castro collective. Later she was phoned by his companions who told her that Oswald said “You Cubans don’t have any guts because Kennedy should have been killed after the Bay of Pigs and some Cuban should have done it.” According to Cox, the Warren Commission reported that Oswald was trying to get into Cuba at this time, citing a photograph as evidence that bears little resemblance to the Oswald arrested in Dallas. A team member comments about the photo, “If this is Oswald, it must be our third Oswald.” Finally, someone using Oswald’s name buys trucks for the group Friends For a Democratic Cuba in New Orleans while the “real” Oswald is known to be in Russia. These examples, along with several others within the scene, show the difficulty of responding to the question: Who is Lee Harvey Oswald? Stone shows through this scene that answering, as the Warren Commission does, that Oswald is the lone, communist killer of Kennedy is inconsistent with the true structure of power behind the killing. Instead, the case of Oswald suggests a crisis of identity.



This crisis is symbolized by the jazz funeral that takes place at the beginning of the scene. Although scene 35 contains a full conversation during the funeral, Stone allows it to continue on through the beginning of scene 36 before the conversation on Oswald starts. A New Orleans jazz funeral remains unique in the United States. A brass band accompanies the funeral march, playing dirges on the way to the grave. After the burial, however, the procession returns to the town with the band now playing celebratory and rousing music.

In scenes 35 and 36, the band blares an improvised version of “When the Saints” accompanied by the wild dancing of the mourners. This funeral can be seen as the symbolic death of a unified identity. The procession mourns at the burial of one individual person but celebrates in jubilation on their return as a group. The group consists of old and young, musicians, dancers, mourners, relatives, friends and strangers. This collective calls for celebration. By placing this funeral sequence just before a scene called “More than one Oswald,” Stone presents the viewer with a crisis of unitive identity. The conspiracy, which disputes Oswald as the lone killer, also effectively challenges the idea that any one person could be the killer. The film implicitly argues that the very notion of unity and identity are inconsistent with the power structure responsible for the murder.

Scene 44 provides the viewer with a window into the paranoia of David Ferrie. Ferrie speaks with Garrison and his team about the murder; once Garrison’s investigation appears in the news, Ferrie fears for his life.



His fear and paranoia stem from his understanding of the power structure that threatens him. Because he fears “everybody - agency, Mob, Cubans…here, Miami, Dallas” he displays an understanding of power as decentralized and dispersed. This presents the viewer with his crisis: a crisis of oneness. Since there is no one to fear, his paranoia runs rampant; during the scene, he checks an investigator for bugs, searches behind closed doors, behind wall decorations, around corners and nearly jumps out the window when he hears a knock on the door. His actions are complemented by his dialog. His conversation runs from Cubans, to Oswald, to the CIA, to Clay Shaw (a man later arrested for conspiracy to murder) to having cancer in his neck to the Mob and on. His fear comes from a perception of the power that is immanent in those acting around him. Remember that Foucault writes “relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter” (History 94).
This immanence, that characterizes a dispersed power structure, comes to a point towards the end of his dialog. He describes the actors he knew saying:

"He [Jack Ruby, Dallas Mob] used to run guns to Castro when he was still on our side. We almost had Castro – then we tried to whack him. Everybody’s flipping sides all the time. It’s fun and games, man, fun and games…there’s more of this than you can dream…Who the fuck pulls whose chain? Who the fuck knows? Oh what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive!"

Ferrie presents the team of investigators with a “web” of actors. Within this web, the actors never work solely for themselves or even to achieve their own goals. There are no clear cut sides, no clear winners and losers and certainly no personal autonomy. There is only the web. When Garrison dares to ask “who killed the President?” Ferrie responds with a statement that Foucault might as well have written:

"Why don’t you fucking stop it? Shit! This is too fucking big for you, you know that? Who did the President? Who killed Kennedy? Fuck man! It’s a mystery. It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The fucking shooters don’t even know!! Don’t you get it!?"

Perhaps the most compelling part of his statement, that the shooters do not know and perhaps cannot know who killed the President, helps the viewer to understand just what sort of power structure is required by the theory Stone proposes. The shooters cannot know who killed the President because “power relations are both intentional and non-subjective” (History 94). There can be no unity, no oneness within this web of actors that kills a President to sustain the system.

Finally, beginning in scene 48 Garrison travels to Washington, D.C. for an enlightening conversation. To continue the theme of crisis, his interlocutor gives no name except “X.” The person as unnamable foreshadows a conversation that will direct Garrison towards seeing a coup d’état as a political crisis. By viewing the scene as Foucault might, the postmodern themes of X’s coup become clear. X first identifies himself as a soldier who participated in planning and executing black operations (black ops), including “assassinations, coup d’état, rigging elections, propaganda, psych warfare and so forth.” Returning from an unexpected trip to the South Pole, X explains how he discovered the President’s murder in New Zealand. He tells Garrison that

"Oswald was charged at 7pm Dallas time with Tippet’s [a Dallas policeman] murder. Now, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon the next day New Zealand time. But already their papers had the entire history of this unknown, 24 year old man Oswald. Studio picture, detailed biographical data, Russian information, and we’re pretty sure of the fact that he killed the President alone, although it took them four more hours before they even charged him for that crime in Dallas. It felt to me like…well it felt like a cover story was being put up, like we would in a black op."

X’s statements here lay background information for conspiracy theorists. But more importantly, they discuss the issue of identity in a new way. Oswald, whose identity has been questionable for the entire film, appears in New Zealand as a narrative with “detailed biographical data.” The paper sells Oswald as a story but as a story necessarily created by the powerful. Oswald’s life in previous scenes can be seen as a construction of the powerful, and so this final retelling of his story to the public is the final selling of his identity to the public. But as Stone sees it, this identity must necessarily be false.



The remainder of the conversation attempts to depict Kennedy’s assassination as a coup. X begins “like Caesar, he [Kennedy] is surrounded by enemies and something’s underway – but it has no face, yet everybody in the loop knows.” He continues by saying

"it started like that, in the wind…just conversations, nothing more. Then a call is made…everything is cellularized. No one has said “he must die.” There’s been no vote, nothing’s on paper. There’s no one to blame. It’s as old as the crucifixion – a military firing squad. Five bullets, one blank, no one’s guilty…That is a coup d’état."

By describing the beginnings of the murder, its actors and its construction X shows Garrison the nature of the power structure as decentralized, organic and dispersed. The explanation rings true with Foucault’s own account of power in History of Sexuality: in power’s “comprehensive systems…the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous” (95). No one person has any true identity or any true autonomy. There are no individuals and only the structure exists tangibly. What results is a coup – the replacement of one with many. No longer can Kennedy control the CIA and military as he has arranged. The structure corrects itself in order that the system, a manifestation of power itself, has control instead of any one individual.

These three scenes from JFK characterize a power structure in action that manifests itself through a crisis of oneness. For that is true nature of the crisis of identity in scene 36, the crisis of unity in scene 44 and the political crisis in scene 48 on. Those expecting to find unity, personal autonomy, and one in any form it will instead find only power - power as plural and diverse. The manifestation of power through a pluralistic web of actors, each without any tangible control over the system, provides the viewer with insight on Foucault’s ideas.