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The mystery man, "X"

http://www.jfk-online.com/jfk100whox.html
The man called "X" (Donald Sutherland) meets the
"Jolly Green Giant," Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner)




One of the most crucial scenes of Oliver Stone's JFK occurs when a mystery man portrayed by Donald Sutherland steps out of the shadows to speak to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner).
"I could give you a false name, but I won't," he tells the DA. "Just call me X."(1)

"I'm not going to name names, or tell you who or what I represent," the man says mysteriously, "Except to say -- you're close, you're closer than you think . . ."(2)

"Something about his manner speaks of authority, knowledge, and above all, old-fashioned honesty," the screenplay reads.(3)

"Everything I'm going to tell you is classified top secret," he tells Garrison, and gives the DA what the script calls a "significant look."(4)

And then he proceeds to fill Jim Garrison in on the truth behind the conspiracy that killed John F. Kennedy.

There is only one small problem: the mystery man "X" never existed; Jim Garrison never had any such informant, and the story "X" tells is nothing more than a combination of speculation and outright fiction.

Like all good fiction, however, Oliver Stone's mystery man is inspired, however distantly, by real life. Let's meet the real-life model for the character portrayed by Donald Sutherland.

'X' is loosely based on Col. L. Fletcher Prouty USAF (Ret.)

As the documented JFK screenplay tells us, "'X' is loosely based on Col. L. Fletcher Prouty USAF (Ret.) who served as Chief of Special Operations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years. While the authors met with Prouty, Jim Garrison did not meet him until several years after the Clay Shaw trial."(5)

There is no doubt that Prouty's credentials are in order, but when Oliver Stone says that his mystery man is "loosely based" on Prouty, what exactly does he mean?

Perhaps Stone is referring to the fact that Col. L. Fletcher Prouty's position in 1963, unlike that of man X, had no connection whatsoever to presidential security. Prouty had no duties to perform in that regard, and he had no access whatsoever to inside information about presidential protection or the Secret Service.

In other words, while "X" relates his tales from first-hand, inside knowledge, L. Fletcher Prouty merely speculates and, in some cases, simply makes things up.

Separate articles in this series are devoted to some of the mystery man's most significant claims, such as his assertions about the Secret Service's performance in Dallas, his recollections about a seemingly mysterious newspaper article, his claims about unusual behavior from US Army Intelligence, John F. Kennedy's relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, and the slain President's intentions in Vietnam. This article will confine itself to a discussion of L. Fletcher Prouty's credibility.

Because Prouty (who passed away in 2001) was outspoken on a wide variety of topics, we are fortunate to have access to a multitude of his beliefs and opinions. Here is a sampling, taken primarily from the Kennedy Assassination Home Page's informative look at Prouty.

According to Prouty:




The forces behind the death of John F. Kennedy included not only the CIA and the military-industrial complex, but also the Federal Reserve Board.

Flying saucers are a reality, and the Air Force has two "bodies" or extraterrestrial objects in storage at one of its bases.

It was an "enormous privilege" to have his book, The Secret Team, reprinted by the Institute for Historical Review, a group Prouty claims keeps people "from revising history," and whose Web site says, "What proof exists that the Nazis killed six million Jews? None."

The Jonestown tragedy was not a suicide, but a mass murder committed by US intelligence and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The high price of oil is artificially maintained by a cabal that shuts down oil pipelines in the Middle East: "Because of the Israelis. That is their business on behalf of the oil companies. That's why they get $3 billion a year from the US taxpayer."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not die a natural death: Winston Churchill had him poisoned.

It "would not surprise" Prouty if Princess Diana and Princess Grace of Monaco were assassinated by the "Secret Team" that killed JFK and countless others.



Click here for more of Prouty's intriguing views.


One of the best behind-the-scenes articles on Oliver Stone's JFK is Robert Sam Anson's "The Shooting of JFK," from the November 1991 issue of Esquire. It features a particularly eye-opening look at L. Fletcher Prouty, which is excerpted here.

Anson writes:




The [advisor from the JFK research community Oliver] Stone heard out most intently was a former Air Force colonel named L. Fletcher Prouty.
An aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years, Prouty since his retirement had become a quirky critic of the CIA, sometimes in books (The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World), more often in the pages of Gallery, one of the raunchier porno magazines. It was the colonel's theorizing about the assassination, however, that made him indispensable to Stone.

According to Prouty, Kennedy had been the victim of a military-industrial-complex plot triggered by his plan to withdraw from Vietnam. The intention had long been bruited by Kennedy partisans, but Prouty had come up with a number of declassified documents to buttress the claim. The most important was a top-secret National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM 263) drafted only six weeks before the assassination. In it, Kennedy formally endorsed a recommendation that one thousand US advisers be pulled out by the end of 1963, with a complete withdrawal of advisers to follow no later than the conclusion of 1965. Once NSAM 263 was signed, said Prouty, Kennedy was, for all intents, a dead man. As Prouty put it: "You could see changes in the civilians who came [into the Pentagon] from the companies and the officers who work in the companies. You never heard people talking about 'President Kennedy' anymore. It was 'that goddamn Kennedy.' Vietnam for them represented the potential of tens of billions of dollars. They could see what he was doing and that he was going to get away with it. This is what caused him to be murdered."

Proceed to further articles in The JFK 100

Newman's warning came at a particularly low moment for Stone. Former LBJ aide and Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti had just gone on record criticizing the movie, and Robert Blakey, who had led the House probe of the assassination, had told a reporter, "I think the whole thing should be interred in Arlington Cemetery." Stories were also circulating that Warners was displeased as well. The studio, it was said, was especially unsettled by the seventh and latest version of the script, which had Johnson telling his advisers, "You just get me reelected and you can have your goddamn war." The fact that such a scene had actually occurred and been previously reported did little to assuage Warner's alleged anxiety.

Despite Stone's employment of Robert Kennedy press secretary Frank Mankiewicz as the production's senior public-relations adviser, the media also continued hammering at JFK and more critical articles were in the works. "Oliver's had bad press before," shuddered Robert Spiegelman, a mass-communications professor serving as a Stone consultant, "but this is going to be the s--- storm of his life."

The shoot too seemed to be taking its toll. After more than a year of seven-day weeks, researching, writing, filming, and editing, Stone was "a real bear," as one of his closest associates put it. His humor was not helped any by how he was treating his body. Evenings out with Costner, he was sometimes drinking, he admitted, more than he should, and what moments he did have for rest were often taken up composing responses to his enemies in the press. "Christ, " Stone groused after one such late-night session. "I feel like a presidential candidate going through all this. Why do I have to defend my movie? I'm not running for office and I'm not asking for a reopening of the investigation. I'm making a movie that will come and go." With only days remaining until wrap, the problem was not Stone's condition, however; it was Fletcher Prouty, who was still saying of the draft NSAM: "There is a terrific story in those papers. They make it clear that someone was preparing the White House for the murder of JFK . . . This is what the death of JFK is all about." Finally, on the second-to-last day of filming, Stone decided to act.

The showdown took place in an Interior Department office that had been made over to appear like the Pentagon lair of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While technicians set lights for the next scene, Stone summoned Prouty and Newman and came right to the point. Prouty's association with Livingstone must immediately end. No more information was to be provided to him, and Prouty was to do his utmost to ensure that he would not publish anything that would discredit the film. Then Stone turned to Prouty's misreading of the critical NSAM. "What's the story, Fletch?" he asked.

Prouty began by saying that he had confused the four-page draft NSAM 273 with the one-paragraph NSAM 263. When Stone, who had seen both documents, appeared dubious, Prouty switched tactics, claiming that the draft NSAM was a forgery and that the source from which it had come -- namely, the Kennedy Library -- had been "infiltrated." At that, Newman tore into him. Prouty was wrong, he said: about Bundy, about "infiltration," about the NSAMs, about the entire case. Unaccustomed to being dressed down by a junior officer, Prouty erupted. "Fletcher really went into orbit," recalled a witness to the meeting. "He jumped up and went into this long tirade about his forty years and how he had done everything and written everything and briefed everybody and if that wasn't good enough for Oliver, he was quitting."

At length, Stone managed to pacify Prouty and the session ended in edgy detente. The incident, though, seemed to mark a turning point for Stone, not only in his unquestioning regard for Prouty, from whom he gently began to distance himself, but in his attitude about the assassination and his film. Never again would he wax quite so rhapsodic about Garrison, whose appalling blunders he had belatedly begun to appreciate. Among his staff, which had long been trying to wean him from the DA, there was hope that, in editing, Stone would loop in a line or two, making his new skepticism clear. Under the growing influence of more of the serious buffs, he was now even willing to admit doubt, not that there had been a conspiracy, or that Vietnam had been its ghastly consequence, but doubt in the certainty that he knew everything.




Proceed to further articles in The JFK 100
on Oliver Stone's man "X" and L. Fletcher Prouty: