The RFK Assassination & THE PARALLAX VIEW (2011)

This essay was included in my book DISSENTING VIEWS II, published in 2011.

​A President and his brother are assassinated, for what reason and by whose order I’m still not certain.[i]
             -Republican Senator George Murphy, speaking in 1970
 
The killing of Robert Kennedy on June 5, 1968, essentially ended the left-wing democratic movements that had been surging throughout the decade.  With his brother John dead, as well as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King – in April that same year – there were no other figures of equivalent stature remaining to carry the banner for the left.  Meanwhile, the civil rights gains so celebrated now had alienated the Southern Democrats, and as a result the Republicans had been able to flip once-blue states to red.[ii]  The immediate beneficiary of the shooting, of course, was Richard Nixon, who gained in 1968 what JFK had denied him in the election of 1960.

The emotional impact on the people still associated with the Left was devastating, throwing into chaos the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.  Congressman Allard Lowenstein, who had aided Bobby Kennedy’s election campaign, appraised it as such: “A man was killed on the fifth of June…and our experiment in democracy – in political action – was stopped.”[iii]  Lowenstein himself proved to be far more moderate than the political forces he allegedly represented, and indeed had been compromised by his association with the CIA.[iv]  It was to these forces that the Democratic Party was ceded.

Warren Beatty had gotten a close-up view of this situation.  Taking time out from Hollywood, he had joined the Robert Kennedy campaign in March of 1968.  Beatty had been a friend of the Kennedy family for years; John once told him that he would have preferred Beatty for the lead in PT 109, the film based on JFK’s own experiences in World War II.  The role was eventually played by Cliff Robertson.[v]  After the assassination, Beatty was understandably shaken.  He later described the RFK assassination “as a ‘horror’ in a handwritten letter to Jean Howard, Charles Feldman’s first wife, a week later.”[vi]

Whether this experience led him to make politically conscious films (eventually devolving into the unfocused cynicism of Bulworth) is unknown, as he has never addressed the subject in detail.  One might venture that such an event must have had some long-term effect on his political views.  In any case, in 1973 he teamed with the director Alan J. Pakula to make The Parallax View, one of the most incisive, political, and indeed radical Hollywood films ever made.  The structure and observations of the film remain trenchant to this day.

​Pakula himself had already made Klute, which depended on a feeling of paranoia created largely by the claustrophobic beauty of Gordon Willis’s cinematography and the motif of a recording device that plays a conversation at irregular intervals during the film.  The suspense in Klute, however, depended on a single deranged personality; by contrast, The Parallax View depicts the system itself as mad.  Pakula commented: “We live in a Kafka-like world where you never find the evil.  It permeates the society…We live in a world of secrets, a world in which we can’t even find out who is trying to destroy our society.”[vii]  These “destroyers” serve the will of bureaucratic men, as nameless mercenaries operating for a private network outside the government.  The film draws as inspiration the details surrounding the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and goes on to explain that murder in the context of these private networks, which presage corporations like Wackenhut and Blackwater.  I will be looking at both of these connections at length.
 
The Opening Sequence
 
Frederick Ives applied for a patent in 1930 on an object he called the “parallax stereogram,” a device producing a three-dimensional image for the viewer.  The technique used was analogous to stereo, in the sense that separate images were presented to the left and right eyes.  It was the combination of the two independent visualizations that connected to form the single three-dimensional illusion.   The parallax concept – merging distinct points of reference into a single illustration or measurement – refers to a literal process in calculating the distances of astronomical objects, but also serves as a useful metaphor in our case.

In The Parallax View, the concept is applied to vantage points both in a literal sense and a larger epistemological sense.  At one level, the key event is an assassination, and the attempt by one reporter to piece together the various points of reference to produce a single image of the real killer.  On another level, the investigation leads into an analysis of how one regards reality.  Is reality simply the collected observations of the participants, or something beyond that?  Pakula suggests this second theme in his use of surreal moments and ‘time-stretching’ scenes that crop up at odd intervals.  The story, credited to screenwriters David Giler and Lorenzo Semple, Jr., is also quite ahead of its time in supposing that hired mercenaries and/or assassins could emerge from a private network with no particular loyalty to anything other than money.

The opening sequence of the film is a beautifully executed set-piece by director Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis.  We first see a totem pole in the foreground as the camera shifts slightly to allow the Seattle Space Needle to emerge in the background.  Then we are at the ground floor of the Space Needle, as reporter Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) narrates events for a television audience: As Senator Carroll pulls up with his wife, she mentions his independent nature, possible presidential aspirations and how good-looking the couple looks in person. As someone who makes her living from visual presentation, she seems unable to discuss anything but the symbolic virtues of the candidate.  “He’s the perfect husband, the perfect father figure,” she says.  Carter then interviews Carroll’s aide, Austin Tucker (William Daniels) who refuses to second the reporter’s suggestion that Carroll will run for President while not seeming displeased at all by the remark.  Then, in a characteristic Pakula move, we first see the main protagonist Joe Frady (Beatty) in a group of other people with no effort made to pick him out for the audience.  Frady, apparently lacking press credentials, tries to use Lee Carter to get up in the elevator, but she declines in such a way as to indicate a past relationship.  Being ever resourceful, he manages to get up to the top anyway. 

Pakula doesn’t bother to show us how this occurs; as a recurring motif in the film, Pakula often denies us the “how.”  In trimming the story down to its most efficient elements, Pakula leaves out a great deal of the action – appropriate for a mystery in which much will be unresolved, including the specific identities of the killers.  This is just one of the many idiosyncratic elements that give the picture quite a different feel from other thrillers.  In place of Point A to Point B choreography, the film relies on the viewer to make intuitive jumps to connect the flow of action – again, highly appropriate given the content of the piece.  Instead, the director opts for a sometimes languid surrealism.

The film cuts to a pan inside the Seattle Space Needle. A thin, small-statured waiter goes from the restaurant out to the observation deck.  One can’t help but notice that he bears a marked physical resemblance to Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the accused assassin of Robert Kennedy.  A series of cuts tells the story: We see another waiter (Bill McKinney) exchange glances with the “Sirhan” waiter and the latter gives his tray to the former.  Meanwhile, the “Sirhan” waiter goes back inside the Space Needle restaurant.  The Senator takes the microphone and begins his speech by stating that it is July 4th, Independence Day, and that he has been called “too independent for my own good.”  At that moment two shots strike him in front, go out his back and he slumps to the ground.  The “Sirhan” waiter has a gun in his hand and is being wrestled by bystanders.  Meanwhile, the Bill McKinney character, whom we now see was also firing, puts his gun away and calmly walks away from the scene.  The presumed assailant breaks free, climbs onto the roof, and after a struggle falls to his death.

The montage that tells this story, despite the horrific nature of the sequence, is executed with a great degree of elegance and efficiency.  Each cut tells us only what we need to know in as little time as possible.  From the shot of McKinney putting away his gun, to the amazing shot of the “Sirhan” patsy rolling off the top of the Space Needle, the sequence is an object lesson in cinematography and editing.

In addition to being an attention-getting opening for the picture, the sequence also contains many parallels to the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, and it seems clear the filmmakers had this in mind.  Besides the physical similarities between Sirhan Sirhan and the patsy in the film who fires shots at Senator Carroll, there are numerous other parallels.  The most important of these concepts is the notion of a ‘second gun,’ which we become aware of in the movie by a quick shot of a second man – the real assassin – pocketing his revolver.  This shot tells us that the man who fired the shots and falls from the roof is not the real shooter but merely a distraction. 

After the fall occurs, the film cuts to the grinning Bill McKinney character, now at street level and several blocks away from the Space Needle.  He’s escaped.  Another cut and the credits begin, as a governmental commission – the most obvious analogue of which is the Warren Commission, although there have been several such entities that produced questionable reports after the fact – declares that the dead man was the lone assassin and there is no conspiracy.

We thus begin the film in a privileged position.  We know there is a conspiracy because we’ve seen the second gunman.  That places us in a very different position from those who investigate real-life crimes, and it also gives us an advantage over the Joe Frady character.  He starts off not believing in conspiracies, only acknowledging their existence because of the evidence.  We follow along with him as he uncovers one detail after another, fleshing out the malevolent system behind the assassin that we, as the audience, have already glimpsed.
 
Parallels
 
What are the true facts in the Robert Kennedy case, and how do they relate to what Pakula and Willis present in The Parallax View?

To begin with the most basic facts, the murder occurred at 6:30 in the evening inside the Ambassador Hotel.  Kennedy had just given a speech in reference to the California primary.  Following the speech, he rode the service elevator down to the kitchen pantry of the Embassy Ballroom inside the hotel.  He addressed the crowd there briefly and was escorted out through the pantry by assistant maître d’ Karl Uecker at approximately 12:15 a.m.  Sirhan Sirhan at this point approached Kennedy from the front and began firing.[viii]  Once Sirhan had been apprehended and the confusion had subsided, Kennedy was transported to Good Samaritan hospital, arriving at 12:50 a.m.  He was pronounced dead at 1:44 a.m.[ix]

The gun Sirhan used to shoot in the direction of Robert Kennedy was described as a .22 caliber Ivor Johnson.  It was an eight shot revolver, and according to the official police report, it expended every shot because eight shell casings were found.  Of these shots, one was lodged in the plaster ceiling; four struck other victims; and three struck Kennedy.  Kennedy received entrance wounds in the “right rear back,” in the “right rear shoulder,” and the “head behind the right ear.”  Each shot struck him at a distance of “one to six inches.”[x]

            It was later discovered, however, that there were in fact ten bullets recovered from the scene.  Two bullets had been found in the center divider panty doors in the kitchen.[xi]

The closest person to Senator Kennedy, Karl Uecker, who was in fact holding his wrist at the time Sirhan fired the shots, testified that Sirhan was in front of Kennedy:

I have told the police and testified during the trial that there was a distance of at least 1½ feet between the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun and Senator Kennedy’s head.  The revolver was directly in front of my nose.  After Sirhan’s second shot, I pushed his hand that held the revolver down, and pushed him onto the steam table.  There is no way that the shots described in the autopsy could have come from Sirhan’s gun.  When I told this to the authorities, they told me that I was wrong.  But I repeat now what I told them then: Sirhan never got close enough for a point blank shot, never.[xii]
 
Uecker testified to the grand jury that Sirhan fired only two shots before he was able to grab Sirhan and hold him down.  According to police, eight shots had been fired.  According to the physical evidence, more than eight shots had been fired.  This is just the first anomaly – could Uecker, the closest witness, a man who actually wrestled the gun from Sirhan at the scene, have been wrong about his firing two shots instead of eight or more?  All of the witnesses agreed on the arrangement of Sirhan in reference to Kennedy, generally within 1½ to five feet away when the shooting began.[xiii]  This showed some slight variation at the furthest end of the observed distance; Pete Hamill, for example, who witnessed the shooting, thought that Sirhan was “seven or eight feet” away.[xiv]  However, there were zero witnesses who placed Sirhan behind Kennedy or closer than 1½ feet.  In addition, the autopsy report prepared by Chief Los Angeles County Medical Examiner Thomas Naguchi confirmed that the bullets all entered from the rear at an upward angle (e.g., as if the person who shot Kennedy had been behind him and on the floor.)[xv]
As it turned out, there was a man standing behind Kennedy: a security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar.  He worked for the Ace Guard Service, where he had been working day shifts at Lockheed.  He told police that he was standing directly behind RFK, had been knocked to the floor, and even that he had withdrawn his gun.  He thus put himself at the scene in an ideal position to create the wounds noted by the Naguchi autopsy report.[xvi]  In an interview in Ted Charach’s documentary about the RFK assassination, Cesar even admits that he didn’t particularly like Bobby Kennedy and would not have voted for him.  In fact, Cesar belonged to the furiously right-wing John Birch Society.[xvii]  Despite these remarkable concessions, Cesar was never more than a witness to the investigation, rather than its focal person of interest.

As anyone can see, the RFK case is quite simple.  The eyewitness reports, physical evidence, and coroner’s report all agree: Sirhan Sirhan did not shoot RFK.  It is scientifically impossible.  And yet the general public and every media outlet “know” that Sirhan did it and to suggest otherwise is crazy.  Contrary to that knowledge, a little research into the true facts of the murder show that suggesting Sirhan did the shooting is crazy.

An enormous amount of information supports the notion of a second gun in the RFK case (indeed, the evidence supports a possible third gun) but much of this came to light after 1973.  Additionally, the farcical trial of Sirhan Sirhan (in which his own defense lawyer, Grant Cooper, stipulated to Sirhan’s guilt, thus denying the jury the opportunity to hear the evidence regarding the second gun) supports the conspiracy verdict.[xviii]   Relevant to our discussion, however, is what was used in The Parallax View to construct the opening sequence.  It derives principally from the notion of having a patsy witnessed in full view at the scene, a real assassin at a totally different angle from the patsy, and the concept that an establishment body, within a few months, declares the total absence of a conspiracy based on a lone nut theory.

With regard to the target, Bobby Kennedy had revealed the same streak of independence that Senator Carroll in The Parallax View echoes.  When his brother was murdered, his first call went to Langley, where he demanded: “Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?”[xix]  That is, did the CIA kill John Kennedy?  He later met with John McCone who assured him this was not the case, but this apparently did not settle the matter for him.  As reported in David Talbot’s Brothers: “There were others behind Lee Harvey Oswald’s gun…the Kennedys made it clear that they did not believe he was acting on foreign orders.  They were convinced that JFK was the victim of U.S. opponents.”[xx]  He had therefore made himself a danger to the establishment in that it seems clear, in retrospect, that one of the things Bobby would have done as President was to reopen the case of his brother’s death.

There were those who publicly questioned the RFK investigation in the years following the murder.  One of them was, ironically, Allard Lowenstein, who drew attention to the disparities between the evidence and the official version, accusing authorities of covering up the crime.[xxi]  In addition, a ballistics expert from Southern California, William Harper, made the same charge, stating that the LAPD had not only suppressed evidence but that microscopic analysis revealed a second gun was used to kill Kennedy.[xxii]
 
Joe Frady’s Discovery
 
 After this opening scene plays out, Frady is told by his friend and former lover Lee Carter that “someone” is killing off the witnesses to the crime.  This seems to be a reference to the large number of suspicious deaths following the JFK assassination that Penn Jones, one of the earliest Warren Commission critics, did a great deal to publicize.[xxiii]  Frady dismisses her fears, but after she is found dead, he reassesses the situation and begins investigating the murder himself.  At this point Pakula sets up a couple of action sequences designed, I think, to seduce the audience into believing that Frady will be able to overcome any obstacle.  He first gets into a standard 1970’s bar fight with a deputy, replete with broken tables and people crashing through walls.  Then, after besting an evil sheriff, he shows off his driving skills by navigating a 1970’s police chase, complete with air jumps and gaping onlookers.  Car chases of this nature were, of course, a standard motif in films of the period, and the one in Parallax is more akin to Live and Let Die then, say, the more realistic Two-Lane Blacktop.  The subliminal message is that despite his countercultural attitude and long hair, we are dealing with a two-fisted Hollywood superhero and can relax: Pakula’s not going to kill Warren Beatty.  Alas, this expectation is subverted in the film’s climactic sequence.

All of the action sequences end after the 35-minute mark in the film, when Frady takes a questionnaire he’s found to a psychologist.  The questionnaire, designed to pull out “potential homicidal qualities,” belongs to the Parallax Corporation.  Frady’s inevitable slide toward destruction begins with his decision to enroll himself as an assassin in an attempt to find out the inner workings of the organization.  Frady, a newspaper reporter, becomes blinded in chasing the story, because it never seems to occur to him that his behavior is more than dangerous – given what he’s already seen, it’s suicidal.

It is in this latter section that rather than looking backward (i.e., at the details of the Robert Kennedy assassination) the film instead begins to acquire a prescient quality. We are introduced to the concept of a privatized network of trained assassins.  In the film, Frady discovers that the Parallax Corporation is in the business of recruiting assassins on a purely mercenary basis, without regard to political affiliation.  In fact, the assassinations which bracket the main action of the story are of two candidates on opposite ends of political ideology.

The film shows us two of their techniques in recruitment once a possible candidate for employment has been found.  First, Parallax deploys a handler to meet face to face.  In this case that man is Jack Younger, played with relish by Walter McGinn.  Younger is urbane, unfailingly polite, and yet sinister, and when he feels he’s established a rapport with Frady he exudes a certain grim sexuality.  In one notable scene, Frady has deliberately given Parallax a false identity for them to uncover and reveal his second false identity as a flasher.  Younger takes his confession with serenity.  “I’ve tried to be a friend to you,” he tells him in a slithery Peter Lorre voice as they both sit in darkness.  “Isn’t that right?”  Younger’s facade invites both fatherly trust and incestuous affection.

In addition to this direct handling, the second tactic employed is active brain-washing, depicted in what is perhaps the film’s most famous sequence.  Frady is asked to come to the Parallax offices.  He is told to sit down on a chair and place his fingers down carefully on the provided slots.  (One may speculate that the direction is both to monitor his physical responses but also to obtain his fingerprints, which are then used on the gun found at the end of the picture.)  The lights go out, a screen comes down and Frady watches a drama unfold – a series of images with both Freudian and Jungian overtones.  The commencement of violent, sexualized, and patriotic images encourages the subject to identify with both a photo of a weeping child but also, by the end, with the Marvel Comics character Thor as an embodiment of Aryan godlike power.  The five-minute film thus depicts brainwashing by way of self-actualization.

 The film itself is a striking montage of stark horrors intermixed with Rod McKuen-like fantasies of childhood love that gradually climax in repeated showings of the Thor image to complete the ego-identification of the subject.  The subject, assumed to be a social misfit, receives a new and palatable explanation for his prior failures to connect with other human beings.  It is not due to any inherent problems within the subject, but rather to his incipient power and greatness.  The brilliant sequence was entirely composed in post-production by Pakula himself, who tinkered with the various images for four months before settling on what is shown in the movie.[xxiv]  Most previous commentators have noted the intense nature of the film and its potential effects on an actual psychopathic personality.  While there is no doubt of its interest in that vein, it could also be seen as a metaphor for the moviemaking experience in general.  After all, Frady enters into a dark room, sits down, and then receives a series of images arranged to depict an onscreen fantasy version of himself.  Isn’t this precisely what most films do?  In “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Pauline Kael observes that audiences “don’t see the movie as a movie but part of the soap opera of their [own] lives.”[xxv]  Since most movies depend on an ego identification with the “hero” of the story, and the heroes of most Hollywood films are near immortals (think of James Bond dodging machine gun fire while sniping away with his Walther PPK, or Clint Eastwood killing hundreds in such entertainments as The Outlaw Josey Wales), isn’t the typical movie creating a Godlike personality for each audience member to experience?  William Goldman addresses this same point in talking about the real-life heroic actions of a fireman and whether it would play onscreen.  Even a dynamic rescue by a fireman whose heroism makes the morning papers is insufficient to tickle the interest of audiences, however.  “This is what Sylvester Stallone does in an action picture before the opening credits start to roll…Stars do not – repeat – do not play heroes – stars play gods.”[xxvi]  Precisely.

 Here the epistemological question is raised: What is the relationship between the moving image and reality?  And more explicitly, how do we know that our own perceptual cues coincide with the real world?  In formal logic, many problems arose from the assumption that the syntax of language formed a one-to-one correspondence with the objects in existence.  This creates philosophical confusion when one gives attributes to things that do not exist; for example, one can correctly say that Joker is the enemy of Batman without also insisting that the Joker and Batman exist as anything other than concepts.  (If this seems elementary, please note that it did not seem so to Plato.  Indeed, a similar confusion underlies Kant’s ontological argument for the existence of God, in which “existence” is categorized as “one of the perfections.”)  Bertrand Russell attempted to get around this with his theory of descriptions.[xxvii]  However, the main philosophical point for our purposes is that The Parallax View touches upon some of these issues as well as the more overt political references.  Just as logic was once thought to bear a correspondent relationship to reality, so it could be argued that our perceptions give us a direct line to it.  In the real world, things are more complex than that, and it gets muddier still when one considers the brainwashing aspect of Parallax’s operation.
 
The Manchurian Candidate
 
 The cult mentality or “brainwashing” aspects of The Parallax View also directly echo the evidence in the RFK shooting.  Going back to the opening sequence of the film, we may recall that the assassination required a patsy or, in this case, a literal fall guy – the waiter who tumbled off the Seattle Space Needle.  Since we’ve now seen Parallax’s homicidal and sexually frustrated corporate training film, we can now infer that the Space Needle patsy had undergone similar “training.”  That is to say, he was a “Manchurian Candidate.”  Sirhan Sirhan himself gave many indications of being such a person.  The term, of course, refers to Richard Condon’s novel (adapted for two subsequent films) about a hypno-programmed assassin.  Could such a thing have any basis in reality?  Indeed, it could and does.

 This is apt to be a controversial claim for some, so we should perhaps first begin by establishing that there was such a thing as a brainwashing program, and that this was pursued by the United States government.  In 1978, The New York Times reported on internal documents showing that the government began a program to find out whether a person could be made to unconsciously commit murder upon command.  It was part of the original Operation Artichoke, which existed from 1949 to 1974.  The story goes on: “Several groups have studied the documents from the standpoint of whether they may provide any evidence in the continuing inquiries into the assassinations to President Kennedy or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”[xxviii]  Artichoke had started out under the name “Bluebird,” one of the operations that eventually became MKULTRA.

Spymaster Richard Helms had been deeply involved in the MKULTRA project.  Having been instrumental in Project Paperclip, under which a number of Nazis – including Klaus Barbie – successfully escaped from Germany after World War II, only to receive financial aid from the CIA and jobs training death squads in Latin American countries, Helms knew his way around a covert operation.  Klaus Barbie would later turn up in Bolivia in 1980, leading private mercenaries (wearing black uniforms and Nazi armbands) during the famous ‘Cocaine Coup.’[xxix]  The future CIA Director Helms made all future research into MKULTRA difficult when he personally ordered all of the records from the project destroyed.[xxx]

 MKULTRA activities fell under the auspices of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s chemical division of technical services staff beginning in 1951.  Gottlieb experimented with dosing patients with LSD and other mind-altering substances for the purpose of perfecting mind control.  He also assisted with the funding of Dr. Ewen Cameron, the Canadian psychologist who conducted similar torture experiments at the McGill Clinic in Montreal.  The financing was handled partially through the CIA and partially through Rockefeller Foundation grants.[xxxi]

One of the locations where MKULTRA mind control experiments took place was at Vacaville Prison in California, while a certain Charles Manson was serving time there.  Over the years, Manson has made several cryptic remarks about that period, including making a reference to a rash of suicides among the doctors performing the testing.  “The last wave…the last wave of these guys who sent me to Vacaville, are all gone now,” Manson says.  “Dr. Morgan blew his brains out.”[xxxii]  It is unclear to what Manson refers, but the implications are interesting.  Dr. Louis “Jolly” Jolyon West, one of the most prominent figures in the mind control atrocities committed in this country, worked at Vacaville during the period of Manson’s incarceration there.  Even more intriguing, his studies focused on behavior modification with an emphasis on controlling disaffected youth.[xxxiii]  Whether there is a connection there I cannot say, but as noted it is interesting – particularly in light of another famous U.S. criminal, Ted Kaczyinski, the ‘Unabomber.’  As a Harvard college student, Kaczyinski had agreed to be the subject in experiments conducted by another MKULTRA specialist, Dr. Henry Murray. Dr. Murray was also well-known for conducting a personality profile on Adolph Hitler at the behest of Wild Bill Donovan, then-head of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA.  The experiments Dr. Murray performed on the young Kaczyinski involved brutal psychological torture, and friends reported that he was a changed person after the experiments.[xxxiv]

 And no wonder.  A CIA memo written in 1955 provides a list of the “materials and methods” that the project will be dedicated to finding.  Among the items listed are “Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public… Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use,” and “Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.”[xxxv]  Could such experimentation have any effect on subjects like Manson or the future Unabomber?

 This experimentation with drugs extended to its own employees, such as in the case of Dr. Frank Olson, who had been employed at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in the biological weapons laboratory.  Gottlieb gave him a drink spiked with large quantities of LSD on November 18, 1953.  That same evening Olson jumped out of hotel room window and fell to his death.  Although some might argue for murder, this was considered a suicide, even during then-DCI Stansfield Turner’s testimony at the 1977 MKULTRA Senate hearings:
 
Senator INOUYE. In February 1954, and this was in the very early stages of MKULTRA, the Director of Central Intelligence wrote to the technical services staff officials criticizing their judgment because they had participated in an experiment involving the administration of LSD on an unwitting basis to Dr. Frank Olson, who later committed suicide. Now, the individuals criticized were the same individuals who were responsible for subproject 3, involving exactly the same practices. Even though these individuals were clearly aware of the dangers of surreptitious administration and had been criticized by the Director of Central Intelligence, subproject 3 was not terminated immediately after Dr. Olson's death.

In fact, according to documents, it continued for a number of years. Can you provide this committee with any explanation of how such testing could have continued under these circumstances?

Admiral TURNER. No, sir, I really can't.[xxxvi]
 
There are specific reasons why Sirhan appears to be a controlled, Manchurian Candidate-style patsy.  Psychologists who spent time with Sirhan realized that he was an eminently hypnotizable subject who, in fact, showed himself to be adept at self-hypnosis.  He remembered nothing of the events concerning the shooting of Robert Kennedy and harbored no personal ill-will toward the man.[xxxvii]  During the shooting, witnesses described the “tranquil” expression on Sirhan’s face, and George Plimpton stated that his eyes were “peaceful.”[xxxviii]  Sirhan’s lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, described an incident in which a psychologist informed Sirhan, under hypnosis, that he was a monkey.  According to Teeter, as soon as he was signaled to do so, Sirhan scrambled up the bars of his cell and hung upside down while making ‘monkey’ noises.[xxxix]

 The passive mental state and readily hypnotizable attitude of Sirhan made him an ideal patsy.  To this day, he has never been able to remember nor give a coherent account of the assassination.

 The Parallax View dispenses with the two patsies in the film by having them killed at the scene – the ideal situation for a political murder.  There is therefore no trial. Even a trial as farcical as the one Sirhan received nevertheless provided a written record of numerous anomalies in the case, such as the aforementioned test firings of two different weapons by the LAPD.  Even in a controlled investigation, such a record provides evidence for researchers to plumb.
 
Does Frady Actually Undertake the Assassination?
 
 In the final sequence of the film, a second assassination takes place.  Frady is in the rafters of a high school gymnasium, where Senator John Hammond is having a fundraising dinner.  A high school band performs patriotic tunes in rehearsal, and Senator Hammond shows up to go through the motions.  We see that the tuba player in the band arrives late, appears to be older than the other students, and seems unable to play.  Soon a shot rings out and the Senator is struck. 
The somewhat surreal nature of the cutting in this scene may lead to a possible confusion with regard to whether Frady himself actually fires the fatal shot or not.  Frady notices that a rifle is up in the rafters with him, but no shot shows him firing the weapon himself, nor anyone else.  However, the tuba player from below fingers Frady by pointing up at him and shouting, “There he is!”  He attempts to escape, but is gunned down by an unknown assailant – possibly the real Parallax-contracted assassin or perhaps the local authorities.  Although Frady never handles the weapon so far as we are shown, as noted it is possible that had his fingerprints been obtained during the earlier brainwashing session, they could have been planted on the rifle here.  In any case, the frame-up is now complete, and in the scene following Frady’s death we see a new independent commission releasing its verdict that he was a “lone nut” who had “acted alone” in shooting Senator Hammond.  By the end, of course, we know the truth: Hammond was a contract killing performed by a highly efficient and professional private company.
 
Blackwater and Beyond
 
Whenever people think of contract killings, it’s very often in the context of the Mafia, of mobsters bumping one another off.  And the CIA has contracted at least one assassination through the Mob: Fidel Castro.  Both entities wanted Castro dead for different reasons.  For the CIA’s part, Cuba was of course seen as part of the overall cold war strategy against the Soviet Union, and its proximity to the United States made it a widely discussed threat in Pentagon circles.  Santos Trafficante, who had run the Havana operations for underworld boss Carlos Marcello, was also very interested in killing Castro because the latter had ruined all his businesses.  Whereas the Mob had enjoyed free reign under the Baustista regime, with the coming of the revolution Trafficante found himself forced to leave the island under threat of imprisonment.  The CIA-Mob connection was fostered by Howard Hughes confidant, Watergate figure, and government operative Robert Maheu:

An alliance with the Mafia was one of the eight conspiracies hatched by the CIA from 1960 to 1965 to eliminate Castro and topple his leftist government.  In the summer of 1960, the CIA asked Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent with Mob contacts, to find Mafiosi who could pull off a hit on the Cuban dictator.  Maheu enlisted John Roselli, a Los Angeles hood, who brought in Chicago’s Sam Giancana and Tampa’s Santos Trafficante Jr.  Of the trio, only Trafficante had intimate knowledge of Cuba and close ties to anti-Castro exiles.[xl]
 
However, none of the various plots against Castro ever worked, and most of them were quite absurd.  This shouldn’t be surprising, since although mobsters may kill each other all the time, this is not the same thing as planning an assassination.  A good example could be found in the names provided.  Both “Handsome Johnny” Roselli and Sam Giancana were called to testify to the Church Committee in 1976.  However, Roselli went missing, only to be found chopped up inside a 55 gallon oil drum.  Five days before Roselli’s body was found, Giancana had been shot seven times in the head at his home.[xli]  This is messy work, characteristic of the Mafia.  Assassins, as Kevin Costner observes playing the role of Jim Garrison in JFK, are generally military.

We’ve entered a whole new era of contracted murders here in the United States, in which the relationships are out in the open and justified by the “War on Terror.”  The contracts, however, go to military-grade professionals, not streetwise petty criminals.  And one of the most interesting things about The Parallax View is its intimation of this corporatized mercenary industry.  It’s a quite logical extension of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, in that Lockheed Martin develops weapons to confer mass casualties on foreign populaces, so why not individual personnel for individual targets?  Without civilian oversight, red tape, or any annoying need to make occasional reports to Congress, such an approach makes perfect sense.

In September of 2007, for example, Blackwater employees slaughtered a number of Iraqi civilians.  Unfortunately, the firm exists without controls.  “CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] Order 17 says private contractors working for the U.S. or coalition governments in Iraq are not subject to Iraqi law.  Should any attempt be made to prosecute Blackwater in the United States, meanwhile, it’s not clear what, if any, law applies.”[xlii]  Faceless men, trained for war, given full impunity to act as they please on a civilian population without fear of consequences?  Would any reasonable person expect anything other than atrocities to arise from such a situation?  One of the milder effects is the creation of a black market which these mercenaries fill for profit, and indeed Blackwater employees are accused of smuggling weapons into Iraq by the Iraqi government itself.[xliii]

There are more paramilitary and civilian contractors in Iraq at present (over 180,000) than actual troops.[xliv]  Because of the enormous commitment in the Middle East, the Louisiana National Guard was unable to deploy in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck.  In their place marched storm troopers wielding automatic weapons on the ground, or else driving Sport Utility Vehicles with windows tinted black.  “Within two weeks of the hurricane, the number of private security companies registered in Louisiana jumped from 185 to 235.”  The firms included such corporations as DynCorp, Intercon, American Security Group, Blackhawk, and Instinctive Shooting International.[xlv]  Instinctive Shooting International?!?  Yes, that’s what it’s really called – an Israeli company specializing in defending the propertied from the unpropertied like Plato’s dogs.  The lesson of our times is that there is not one Parallax but many, as the driving engine of mass capitalism breeds imitation; a thousand Parallaxes paid to do the bidding of the powerful.

These Blackwater thugs and Wackenhut security installations have become the new centurions.  Indeed, we cannot rule out the involvement of private industries being at the root of numerous assassinations of political figures, mostly of the left, throughout the last 40 years.  Many of these killings also bear the earmarks outlined in The Parallax View: a seemingly brainwashed, mentally defective patsy, and the possible involvement – in either funding or training – of private institutions.  This has happened time and again, with Bobby Kennedy’s murder being but one example.

Private industries have been able to perform duties that would normally be handled by federal employees, which not only increases profit but decreases liability.  When John Negroponte (himself infamous for studiously failing to notice the presence of CIA-trained Contra death squads in Nicaragua beginning in 1981) became the Ambassador to Iraq, he traveled everywhere with a contingent of Blackwater guards.[xlvi]  As previously noted, these guards were above Iraqi, American, and International law, undoubtedly convenient for a man like Negroponte.  However, at the same time, Blackwater argued in court that its dead mercenaries were ineligible for anything except government-funded insurance.[xlvii]  This slippery mindset – floating between federal and private – should perhaps be unsurprising given that these firms are generally started by people who were once in the federal government.  The concept is to get all of the advantages of state power and private means without any of the limitations.  Blackwater itself, for example, was started by Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL.[xlviii]  Similarly, Wackenhut began as a detective agency in 1954 created by former FBI employee George Wackenhut.  With the aid of his influence, the agency lived off government contracts, but the company really took off in the late 1980s with the prison industry.  They are now the third largest prison contractor in the United States.[xlix]  Their prisons have a remarkable reputation for poorly trained guards and violent incidents.  A report, for example, created for the Scottish government when contemplating expansion of Wackenhut prisons in that country collects numerous violent incidents across six states, notes their terrible reputation, close ties to the CIA, and lack of controls.  It also points out that Ronald Reagan’s notorious CIA director William Casey, before he was placed in that position, was Wackenhut’s lead counsel.[l]  Given Casey’s involvement in the Iran-Contra operation, among other crimes, this does not inspire confidence in the organization.

This leads perhaps to another pressing issue in the explosion of the privatization of violence.  As noted in The Parallax View, such companies obey nothing but money and power.  It makes no difference to them whether they kill a leftist or a right-winger, a criminal or a great statesman; their loyalties are not to an ideology but their stockholders.  Is it an accident that the huge increase in the numbers of private prisons over the last twenty years has been accompanied by an equivalent increase in the number of people incarcerated?  Is it an accident that the profit margins of private mercenary firms mirror the increase of instability across the globe?  The motivation to pursue profit is not the same thing as the motivation to pursue justice.

Accompanying this change has been a change in how criminality itself is perceived.  Whereas criminal behavior had been seen as deviant from prescribed norms or the result of poor socialization, current models show crime as an inevitable byproduct of group activity in a mercantile system.  The theoretical position is that theft is an outgrowth of the desires capitalist societies instill in their citizens to maintain themselves.  Or, as George Carlin puts it: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods – now this [Commandment] is just plain fucking stupid.  Coveting our neighbors’ goods is what keeps the economy going.”[li]  This attitude, of great utility to those who would profit off crime, means certain changes in the way crime is viewed:

A thousand small adjustments are required.  Replace cash with credit cards.  Build locks into the steering columns of automobiles.  Employ attendants in parking lots and use close circuit TV cameras to monitor city centre streets…Encourage local authorities to co-ordinate the various agencies that deal with crime.[lii]
 
That is, the movement is to create a surveillance society permeated by new business interests that fill the various social requirements.  Close circuit television cameras are made by a manufacturer who has the same goal that every business in a capitalist society has: to expand.  This is precisely what has happened at the Pentagon, as contracts are handed out to such entities as Halliburton to take over aspects of war that used to be handled by the government.  In 2003 this resulted in a $1.7 billion windfall for the company.[liii]  This creates a situation in which huge corporations such as Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, McDonnell-Douglas, Blackwater, Wackenhut, DynCorp and Booz Allen Hamilton, among many others, have a vested interest in increasing the relative amount of chaos in this world.
 
The Establishment View
 
 Critical response to The Parallax View was generally harsh.  In the case of Vincent Canby, he asserted both that the picture was not successful entertainment, complaining that the screenplay did not have the “wit [of] Alfred Hitchcock,” but also that to “treat a political assassination conspiracy merely as a subject for fun is frivolous.”  He thereby in the same breath desires that the film be less realistic and sober, but also not treat its given subject lightly.  At bottom, he doesn’t take it seriously:

According to this film, the Parallax Corporation has a recruiting program as thorough as that of General Motors, and much more paternal. Parallax seems to be vaguely right-wing, but the movie is fuzzy on this. It's also fuzzy on logistics. If, as is shown, Parallax insists on eliminating not only contracted targets but also all possible witnesses, as well as witnesses of witnesses, it would seem the population could, theoretically, be reduced by half in eighteen months.[liv]
 
Richard Schickel, writing for Time, seems to be offended by the very conception of the film, relying on his amateur psychoanalysis to assess the entire enterprise: “It is apparently comforting for many people to believe that the course of the world is changed more by rational planning, however evil, than it is by irrational individual actions.”  He actually praises the action genre elements of the film, calling the fistfight and car chase “smartly handled,” while failing to understand their placement within the overall context.  He then dismisses everything that happens after these routine elements.  He goes on:
But there is no way to build an overparanoid thriller or to provide a satisfactory ending. If the hero can break the conspiracy unaided, it cannot be much of a conspiracy. If, on the other hand, the conspiracy is all powerful, then the audience is robbed of the basic pleasure of identifying with the protagonist's triumph over the odds. Pakula opts for the latter resolution in Parallax and it is a downer. Though a touch of paranoid fantasizing can energize an entertainment, too much of it is just plain crazy—neither truthful nor useful. And certainly nothing for responsible men to try to make a buck with in the movies.[lv]
 
Schickel thus invokes two highly typical responses to conspiracy films and also conspiracies in general: on the one hand, he states that they are essentially psychological constructs rather than evidential ones, while also implying that “paranoid fantasy” is somehow too serious of a subject for commercial exploitation.  Like Canby, he seems unable to resolve the internal confusion here.  Either the subject is too serious for entertainment purposes, or it is not entertaining enough, but surely it cannot be both.  And yet Canby and Schickel, both well-respected critics, share this quandary.

For both critics, it seems that in any case a film like The Parallax View must be pure fantasy, and a distasteful one at that.  It could not be the case that the film could have a kernel of truth at its core.  At a more fundamental level, the thought process depicted here in these critiques is that all conspiracy-thinking is not to be taken seriously; indeed, it may even be dangerous.  But all of this a priori rejection of such thought takes place without reference to any facts, and neither review takes any time to place the film within any meaningful historical context.  This deliberately ahistorical approach makes it impossible to understand the deep structures that underlie the drama.

 We see this approach taken by establishment writers time and again when facing films like The Parallax View in dealing with subjects anathema to national pride.  The most extreme example, of course, is with JFK, in which TIME Magazine ran a critical story of the picture before it was even released, based on a stolen draft of the script.  However, there is this continual methodology of distancing the subject from the real world, and then expressing disapprobation at any overlap, with a hint that the filmmakers have a strong financial motivation to “make a buck” exploiting real-life scenarios.  These are, however, the techniques of the propagandist; in applying invented motivations for both the creators and the intended audience of the film, they fail to address the subject head-on.  Evidence is dismissed in favor of broad general assessments – a characteristic of thought that Tocqueville, I might observe, felt was instinctual and habitual with Americans.
Nevertheless, the evaluation of The Parallax View’s credibility depends entirely on one’s familiarity with the evidence that its method of representation has some relationship to reality.  For most people, entering into the theater under the veil of ignorance, it represents a yarn, perhaps even a disturbing one.  But one cannot appreciate the depth of its critique without having gone through some of the real-world incidents that it observes and reflects.  I have tried to dig out and present some of this information, in the interest of changing paradigms blinded by an inability to accept unpleasant truths.  Unlike what occurs in the parallax stereogram, alas, the two images – one presented by orthodox wisdom, the other presented by the dirty details – can never be reconciled.
 
 

ENDNOTES
 


[i] Bill Boyarsky, “Murphy Hints at Plot in Kennedy Murders,” Los Angeles Times, 16 September 1970.

[ii] Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy (Viking: New York 2006), 179-181.

[iii] Richard Cummings, The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (InPrint.com, Inc.: New York 1985), 359.

[iv] David Harris, Dreams Die Hard (St. Martin’s Press: New York 1982), 108; also see “Allard Lowenstein: an Exchange,” The New York Review of Books, Volume 33, Number 1, 30 January 1986, which cites, among other things, an FBI informant who told the agency about Lowenstein’s CIA status.

[v] Suzanne Finstad, Warren Beatty: a Private Man (Harmony Books: New York, NY 2005), 389.

[vi] Ibid, 394.

[vii] Jared Brown, Alan J. Pakula: His Films and His Life (Backstage Books: New York 2005), 126.

[viii] LA County District Attorney’s Report, part 1, from the FBI’s file on the RFK assassination.

[ix] LA 56-156 FBI report on time of death, from the FBI’s sub-file Vol. 1 on the RFK assassination.

[x] Officer DeWayne A. Wolfer’s official report dated 8 July 1968.  Obtained at the Poage Legislative Library, Baylor University, Penn Jones Papers.

[xi] “Ten shots from an eight shot revolver,” Los Angeles Free Press, 6 June 1969. Obtained at the Poage Legislative Library, Baylor University, Penn Jones Papers.

[xii] Statement by Karl Uecker, Stern Magazine, February 1995 issue.

[xiii] Lilian Castellano, “Truth Committee Releases Conspiracy Evidence on RFK,” The Midlothian Mirror, 22 December 1970.  Obtained at the Poage Legislative Library, Baylor University, Penn Jones Papers.

[xiv] Police interview of Pete Hamill, 6 August 1968, from the FBI’s file on the RFK assassination.

[xv] Jerry Policoff, “New Evidence That Sirhan Missed Bobby,” The Iconoclast, Vol. VII, No. 12, 8 June 1973.  Obtained at the Poage Legislative Library, Baylor University, Penn Jones Papers.

[xvi] William Turner and John Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Carrol & Graf: New York 1993 [1978]), 166-168.

[xvii] Interview can be seen in Ted Charach’s documentary film The Second Gun.

[xviii] James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, ed., The Assassinations (Feral House: Los Angles 2003), 539.

[xix] David Talbot, Brothers (Free Press: Simon & Schuster: New York 2007), 6.

[xx] Ibid, 32.

[xxi] United  Press International (wire), 20 February 1975.

[xxii] Zodiac News Service (wire), 17-18 February 1975.

[xxiii] John Kelin, Praise from a Future Generation (Wings Press: San Antonio TX 2007), 315-317.

[xxiv] Brown, 134.

[xxv] Philip Lopate, ed.  American Movie Critics (The Library of America: New York 2006), 364.

[xxvi] William Goldman, Which Lie Did I Tell? (Random House: New York 2000), 83.

[xxvii] Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (Simon & Schuster: 2007 [1945]), 830-831.

[xxviii] Nicholas Horrock, “C.I.A. Documents Tell of 1954 Project to Create Involuntary Assassins,” The New York Times, 9 February 1978.

[xxix] Michael Levine & Laura Kavanau-Levine, The Big White Lie (Thunder’s Mouth Press: New York 1993), 55-58.

[xxx] Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout (Verso: New York 1998), 198.

[xxxi] Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair, ed., “CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb: Pusher, Assassin, & Pimp,” Counterpunch, http://www.counterpunch.org/gottlieb.html.

[xxxii] Television interview of Charles Manson, 1997.

[xxxiii] Cockburn & St. Clair, Whiteout, 201.

[xxxiv] Alton Chase, “Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 2000, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/06/chase.htm.

[xxxv] “MKULTRA Materials and Methods,” declassified government document, 5 May 1955.

[xxxvi] CIA Director Stansfield Turner’s testimony, 1977 Senate Hearings on MKULTRA, 35-36.

[xxxvii] Turner and Christian, 194.

[xxxviii] Ibid, 197.

[xxxix] “CIA Interventions: The Role of the CIA and the LAPD in the RFK Assassination,” lecture by Lawrence Teeter, 14 November 2000, from the DVD The Life and Work of a Genuine Working Class Hero, obtained through JusticeVision, http://justicevision.blogspot.com/.

[xl] Selwyn Raab, Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires (St. Martin’s Press: New York 2006), 144.

[xli] “Deep Six for Johnny,” TIME Magazine, 23 August 1976, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,945646,00.html.

[xlii] Alex Koppelman & Mark Benjamin, “What happens to private contractors who kill Iraqis?  Maybe nothing,” (Salon.com, 18 September 2007), http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/09/18/blackwater/print.html.

[xliii] BBC News, “Blackwater ‘arms smuggling probe,’” 22 September 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/7008058.stm.

[xliv] Koppleman & Benjamin, “What happens to private contractors who kill Iraqis? Maybe nothing”

[xlv] Jeremy Scahill, “Blackwater Down,” The Nation, 10 October 2005.

[xlvi] Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater (Nation Books: New York 2007), 282-283.

[xlvii] Ibid, 232.

[xlviii] Ibid, 28.

[xlix] Kenn Thomas & Jim Keith, The Octopus (Feral House: Los Angeles CA 2004), 32.

[l] Phil Taylor & Christine Cooper, Privatised Prisons and Detention Centres in Scotland: An Independent Report, http://visar.csustan.edu/aaba/Cooper&Taylor.pdf.

[li] George Carlin, from his standup performance Complaints and Grievances (2001).

[lii] David Garland, The Culture of Control (University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2001), 129.

[liii] Michael Dobbs, “Halliburton’s Iraq Contracts Exceed $1.7 Billion,” The Washington Post, 28 August 2003.

[liv] Vincent Canby, “The Parallax View [film review],” The New York Times, 20 June 1974.

[lv] Richard Schickel, “Paranoid Thriller,” Time Magazine, 8 July 1974.