Executive Action is a 1973 movie about the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, written by Dalton Trumbo, Donald Freed and Mark Lane.
It is one of three American films to present a dramatization portraying the JFK assassination as a conspiracy (the others being Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK and Neil Burger's 2002 mockumentary Interview with the Assassin). Despite many similarities of the plotline to JFK, Executive Action presents a far more direct and unemotional account of the Kennedy assassination than Stone's film. The film is done in an almost documentary style and was clearly filmed on a small budget, despite the presence of two big Hollywood names, Robert Ryan and Burt Lancaster. Another big difference to JFK is that the story is told entirely from the perspective of the conspirators.
Plot
Opening scene is set in June 1963 at a gathering of shadowy industrial, political and former US intelligence figures who are giving vent to their growing dissatisfaction with the Kennedy administration. The scene takes place in the plush surroundings of the lead conspirator, Robert Ryan, presumably a Texas oil baron. He and the others are trying to convince Ferguson, a white-suited and mustachioed figure — a hugely powerful oil magnate — to back their plans for an assassination of Kennedy. He remains unconvinced saying 'I don't like such schemes. They're only tolerable when necessary, and only permissible when they work.' Burt Lancaster, a black ops specialist, is also among the group. The film then cuts to somewhere in the desert where a shooting team is doing target practice at a moving object. One of the shooters says that they can only guarantee the operation's success by slowing down the target to 15 mph.
The film intercuts between conversations among the lead conspirators, Lancaster and Ryan, and preparations for the assassination. The approval of the man in the white suit is crucial to the conspirators, although Lancaster proceeds to organize two shooting teams in anticipation that he will change his mind.
We then see sequences of the man in the white suit watching contemporary newsreel and becoming clearly concerned at Kennedy's increasingly 'liberal' direction: action on civil rights, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, nuclear disarmament. The deciding moment comes when he's watching an anti-Kennedy news report on the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. It is followed by Kennedy's 'suicidal' October 1963 decision to withdraw all US advisors from Vietnam by the end of 1965, effectively ending America's direct involvement in the Vietnam War. He picks up the phone to tell Ryan he now fully supports their project.
While the motives of the man in the white suit are clear, through dialogues between Ryan and Lancaster, the film attempts to cast light on the murky paranoid fears of the conspirators about the future of America and the white races. In an eerily prophetic quote, Ryan forecasts the population of the third world in 2000 at 7 billion, 'Most of them yellow, brown or black. All hungry and all determined to love; they'll swarm out of their breeding grounds into Europe and America'. He sees Vietnam as an opportunity to control the developing world and reduce its population to 50 million: 'I've seen the plans,' says Ryan, adding that they can then apply the same 'birth-control' methods to unwanted groups in the US: poor whites, blacks and Latinos.
The film postulates the same theory as JFK that Lee Harvey Oswald is being steered to become the conspiracy's 'patsy', but unlike JFK, the conspirators use a double of Oswald to shadow him in the weeks leading up to the assassination to leave behind a trail that the authorities can easily follow and link Oswald to the assassination. The film makes no explicit link to US government agencies and the conspiracy, although the professionalism of Lancaster's shooting team clearly indicates they have worked for the CIA on special assignments. The film implies that most of the law enforcement and government agencies were not involved, but just grossly inept: no special measures were taken for the president's safety in Dallas; there is no communication between the FBI, CIA and Secret Service on possible security risks; even the head of the Secret Service stays in Washington during the visit. This explanation helps understand why the authorities were so keen to pin the blame on Oswald, the rogue assassin, who is 'served up' by the conspirators to the authorities as an easy escape from any accusations of their own negligence.
The post-assassination conspiracy is also covered in the film. Lancaster tells Chris, the head of the shooting teams, who at this point don't know who their target is, that after this job he and his men will never have to work again. All the assassins are black ops professionals trained never to talk about operations they are involved in. Each one is offered $25,000 per year for the next five years provided the operation's cover isn't blown. If the cover remains intact in five years time (1968) 'every man jack of them' (Lancaster) will receive a further $100,000 into their Swiss bank accounts. The head of the shooting teams then tells Lancaster: 'You just told me who we're going to hit.'
At the end of the film a photo collage is shown of 18 witnesses all but two of whom died from unnatural causes within three years of the assassination. A voice-over says that an actuary of the British newspaper The Sunday Times calculated the probability that all these people who witnessed the assassination would die within that period of time to be 1000 trillion to one.[1]
The original music is by Randy Edelman.
Executive action is also a term used in the mid-20th century by the CIA.
References
- ^ The number given in The Sunday Times article on February 26, 1967 was in fact 100,000 trillion to one. In response to a request by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 for a copy of the actuarial study, the legal manager for the Times replied that the article was "based on a careless journalistic mistake and should not have been published. This was realized by The Sunday Times editorial staff after the first edition — the one which goes to the United States and which I believe you have — had gone out, and later editions were amended … We asked [the actuary] the wrong question … what were the odds against fifteen named people out of the population of the United States dying within a short period of time … [instead of] the odds against fifteen of those included in the Warren Commission index dying within a given period," which they said would have been "much lower." HSCA Hearings, vol. 4, p. 463–465. Robert M. Musen, vice president and senior actuary at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, estimated that the odds of 15 people out of 2,479 in the Warren Commission index dying within a three-year period, assuming a median age of 40, would be 98.16 percent, or one out of 1.2. Assuming a median age of 35, the number would be 57.09 percent, or one out of 1.75. Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History (2007), p. 1013–14.
External links
