False Witness by Patricia Lambert Page A

total reversal of reality.” Lerner was enthralled for awhile, he recalled, until his “sanity” was restored.
    Oliver Stone’s reality reversal was permanent. He stepped into Garrison’s magic web and never stepped out. He saw in Garrison’s experience material for a film that would reveal what he described as “the untold story” of the assassination. Stone optioned the book himself. “Iwanted to get this story out,” he said. And so he did. Stone proceeded to create a movie energized by the passion he felt about the Vietnam war that turned the history of the Garrison investigation upside down and pulled fifty million moviegoers into Garrison’s “never-never land world.”
    The process was not easy. Along the way, Stone encountered a major bump in the road. During the summer of 1991, while he was still shooting the film, the media erupted with stories challenging his intentions.
    The instigator was Harold Weisberg, an aging and ill first-generation assassination investigator, best known for his
Whitewash
series of books. Weisberg, part of that loose-knit community of writers and researchers originally known as the critics of the Warren Report, had acquired firsthand knowledge of Garrison’s shortcomings back in the sixties when he had traveled to New Orleans and for a time assisted him. Stone was in Vietnam most of that period and had missed the Garrison phenomenon. Appalled that a film glorifying Garrison was being planned, Weisberg tried to enlighten Stone in a letter. Stone’s response, which came from his assistant, was entirely unsatisfactory to Weisberg, who then took a dramatic step that struck at the heart of Stone’s operation.
    From the outset, Stone had engaged in extraordinary security precautions. Even the name of the film, known only as “Project X,” was a secret. Crew members were required to sign nondisclosure statements. Stone had his office swept for bugs, and drafts of the screenplay were numbered and locked away. Nevertheless, Weisberg obtained a copy of the script and leaked it to columnist George Lardner, Jr., at the
Washington Post
. 3 This ignited what would eventually become a firestorm of criticism from journalists who had covered Garrison’s investigation and retained strong opinions about him. *
    The
Dallas Morning News
led off with an article that labeled Stone’s plan “morally repugnant.” Lardner followed that with a scathing attack on the “errors and absurdities” in the screenplay and on Stone himself. Stone, Lardner wrote, was “chasing fiction.” Lardner also called Garrison’s investigation “a fraud.” Stone fired off a response defending his film, and, in a disquieting echo of Garrison’s reaction to criticism a quarter century earlier, implied that Lardner was working for the government’s intelligencecommunity. Lardner threatened to sue, but reportedly accepted instead a complete retraction from Stone. Before long, others were expressing their opinions both pro and con, sometimes passionately, occasionally with a good deal of wit, mostly in letters to the editor and newspaper editorials around the country. Stone seemed genuinely wounded by this unprecedented barrage of media criticism before his film was even finished. But he benefited from all that free press coverage. As one observer noted once the film was released, Stone was riding a wave of negative publicity.
    JFK
, a three-hour-and-seven-minute marathon, premiered in Los Angeles on December 17, 1991, at Mann’s Village Theater in Westwood and opened nationwide on Friday, five days before Christmas. * Audience reaction was intense. A writer for the
Los Angeles Times
reported “gasps” and “tears” during the Abraham Zapruder film sequence showing the moment the president died. “Nobody left to get popcorn,” he wrote. What made the movie such a powerful experience was its