JFK and the popular mind Robin Ramsay. There are certain events in American history which serve as the focal points of ideological struggle between left and right: the 1930s depression, the entry of the USA into World War II, the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss - and the Kennedy assassination . Take the massive Anglo-American media attention devoted to Edward J. Epstein's book Legend in 1973. In that Epstein sought to re-establish the Warren Commission's verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald alone did the dirty deed; but adding to it the suggestion t hat he had been got at by the KGB. Oswald was still a 'lone nut' but somehow the KGB's 'lone nut'. In fact, despite spending a great deal of Readers=D5 Digest research money, Epstein found no evidence that Oswald was KGB, and his rehash of the Warren Comm-i ssion's version of the shooting in Dallas was as inept as its progenitor. Why did he do it? Epstein was by then the spokesman for James Jesus Angleton, the paranoid former head of CIA Counter Intelligence who had been sacked in 1974. Angleton believed that Oswald was KGB because a KGB defector to the CIA called Nosenko had sai d that he (Oswald) wasn=D5t KGB, and Angleton believed that Nosenko was a false defector. Angleton had also been very close to the Israeli government since the late 1940s and in 1978 the Israeli government - and the Israeli lobby in the United States - were enthusiastic supporters of the Second Cold War then being cranked up in the United States. The logic of the position looked like this: Israel needed continued U.S. support, and that support had been waning ever since the OPEC oil price rise of 1973. Such support could best be ensured by presenting Israel as the United States' most reliable, ant i-Soviet ally in the Middle East. (There are the occasional hints that Israeli intelligence had a hand in the Italian 'strategy of tension' simply to help undermine U.S. confidence in Italy, Israel's main regional rival in the Friends-of-the-USA contest.) But the Israeli role was only plausible if there actually was a perceived Soviet 'threat'. Epstein's repackaging of Oswald as KGB was a handy, bite-sized piece of psychological warfare in that campaign. If we add the final pieces; that the CIA seems to have had some kind of relationship with the Reader's Digest - who funded Epstein's 'research' - since the early years of the First Cold War; that Epstein's book appeared in time to pre-empt the report of t he House Select Committee on Assassinations, then you have the pieces in a puzzle to which only Epstein knows the solution. Fourteen years and three disastrous terms of infantile rightwing Republican government later, Oliver Stone reworks the shooting in Dallas from a (vaguely) left perspective. And - to no-one's surprise - where Epstein's version got oceans of sycophantic att ention in the Anglo-American media, Stone gets hammered before the film has even been shot. At the centre of the Stone movie are Jim Garrison, the New Orleans DA, and Clay Shaw, the gay businessman Garrison charged with conspiracy to kill the President. How things change. . . Two years ago issue 20 of Lobster included a long analysis of the UK n ames in Clay Shaw's address book. It evinced one letter, from a Daily Mirror journalist, who described the piece as 'quintessential Lobster'- i.e. of interest to few, fascinating nonetheless, and unlikely to find a publisher anywhere else. When Stone's mo vie was released here he rang to ask if he could use the Shaw material in a piece he thought he had sold to the Sunday Times. (The story didn't appear, in the end.) But Shaw had gone from being ultra-obscure to mainstream in about 3 months - thanks to JFK . When did a cultural event change the climate so fast and so permanently in this country? 'Cathy Come Home' in the mid sixties? I liked Stone's film, despite its sentimentality, the soapy domestic scenes chez 'Garrison' and the preposterous closing speech. It is a remarkable piece of mainstream narrative cinema (with one dazzling cameo from Ed Asner as Guy Bannister). My only mino r quibble would be that missing from Stone's narrative are the people who published criticisms of the Warren Commission Report before Jim Garrison began in 1967. Credit where credit is due: that the Warren Commission didn't get away with their snow job ab out Oswald, is down to the work of the assassination buffs. In 1964 virtually the entire U.S. establishment - media, politicians, U.S. state authorities, CIA etc. - agreed on the 'lone nut' solution. Against them were ranged a handful of Americans - a goo dly proportion of them women, Mae Brussel and Sylvia Meagher, for example - who knew they were being sold a pup and refused to buy it. Facing massive hostility, ridicule and, in some cases, harassment from the state authorities, the JFK assassination buff s persisted and eventually overturned the official version of reality. This is a remarkable achievement that Stone might just have nodded towards. Finally, the impact of the film illustrates the problems for the security apparatus of the nation state now represented by the global media. Twenty or thirty years ago it was possible for the National Security apparatus to put out a line to its agents of influence inside the mass media - as the CIA did against Jim Garrison, Mark Lane and other critics of the Warren Commission - and what was called 'the mighty Wurlitzer' of CIA propaganda would crank into action. These days it is more difficult to rubbish a book or film out of existence. The pre-release assaults on Stone in the U.S. media served simply as global PR for the film. The U.S. government has not yet learned the lesson the British state learned during its attempts to suppress Spy Catcher.=20