As we approach November 22, 2013 — the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination — I thought it was appropriate for me to remind those who follow me as an author and filmmaker that the thing I’ve written that has reached a wider audience than anything else in my four decade career was the script for The Twilight Zone I wrote in 1985, “Profile in Silver,” that the CBS television network broadcast in prime time on March 7, 1986. New documentaries and docudramas being cranked out for this grim anniversary focus on the question of whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin or whether there was a conspiracy to end the JFK presidency — a coup d’etat as Oliver Stone most-effectively proposed in his 1991 film, JFK. As you can read below in my first-draft script I wrote a second gunman firing from the grassy knoll that was cut out on the demand of a CBS executive who wrote in a memo read to me on the phone, “The CBS television network is not going to rewrite history.” That establishment history the CBS television network was unwilling to rewrite was the Warren Commission Report intended — depending who one asks — either to implement President Lyndon Johnson’s order that the Soviet Union and Cuba be exonerated to prevent escalation of the Cold War into a nuclear third world war, or to end speculation that the Vice President from Texas ascended to the presidency by conspiring with others who saw advantage in killing Kennedy on the Vice President’s home turf. For me, my little science-fiction drama asked a different question: what is the nature of political power and following the Second World War had the presidency devolved into the imperial office the framers of the United States had worked so hard to prevent. I asked that question by the story device of unKilling Kennedy for a half hour. I think it’s clear — half a century later — that whether or not the JFK assassination was at the hands of a Lone Gunman or a conspiracy of Lone Gunmen, what happened in Dallas a half-century ago was only the beginning of normalized clandestinely organized violence that has reached from the rice paddies of Southeast Asia to the mountains of Afghanistan to the core financial district in New York City to the Political Zone in Washington DC. The following article was first published here June 15th, 2010, and includes links to watch “Profile in Silver” as it was aired on CBS 26 years ago. – J. Neil Schulman, November 11, 2013
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 19:54:06 +0000