ROVIDENCE - In his 1991 movie, ''J.F.K.,'' Oliver Stone tried
to raise grave concerns about US officials' complicity in John F.
Kennedy's assassination. But the question it left with Max Holland was not
one that the conspiracy-minded director had intended.
''I thought, `Could the American government possibly have been that organized as to participate in a cover-up and do everything else that Stone suggested?''' Holland recalled in his office at Brown University. ''I really believed it couldn't ... so I set out to find out for myself.''
Holland's skepticism led him to embark on one of the most exhaustive examinations ever conducted into the Warren Commission's investigation of Kennedy's death. And his conclusions in a book to be published next year offer a comprehensive, strikingly intuitive explanation of events that continue to generate debate 35 years after a bullet took Kennedy's life.
Simply put, Holland argues that previous examinations have resulted in erroneous conclusions and faulty conspiracy theories because they failed to take into account sufficiently the pervasive political context in which the key players of the time operated: the Cold War.
Holland found, for instance, that Warren Commission members learned early in their process that there was no foreign plot to kill the president. But they could not reveal that information without jeopardizing sources, which were classified intercepts from Communist governments discussing the assassination and its perpetrator, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Similarly, Holland, 47, faults Chief Justice Earl Warren, a liberal, for his insistence that the final report not fuel already heated anticommunist sentiment and thereby risk creating another McCarthy era. As a result, references to Cuba and the Soviet Union were eliminated or blurred, even though Oswald evidently sympathized with the Kremlin and was driven, in large part, by his anger at the American government's hostile policies toward Castro.
Warren felt justified in his decision because the commission found no operational links between Oswald and any communist state, according to Holland. But, by effectively robbing Oswald of an ideological motive, Warren left a critical question unresolved and provided fodder for conspiracy theorists.
''He was a very vain man,'' Holland said of Warren. ''He did a great deal of good, of course, but he also tended to believe he didn't just administer justice, he embodied it. If Earl Warren says this is what happened, you just had to accept it ... and that was a mistake we've been paying for ever since.''
Holland agrees with previous researchers that the CIA, the Justice Department, and other agencies withheld from the commission significant data and were otherwise uncooperative. But in his book he maintains they did so to prevent leaks about American moles, wiretaps, and other clandestine resources in Cuba and the Soviet Union, not to hide any role by US agents in Kennedy's death or to alter the course of the commission's inquiry.
''They were given such high-level information on the Warren Commission that it never occurred to them that there was stuff they weren't getting,'' said Holland, a contributing editor of The Nation magazine and the Wilson Quarterly, who is completing a fellowship at Brown to finish his 650-page book, ''A Need to Know: Inside the Warren Commission.''
While he generally defends the commission and its conclusions, Holland agrees it had major problems, both of its own making and as a result of obstacles placed in its path.
So he faults Robert F. Kennedy, then attorney general, for blocking access to information that ranges from US plans to kill Fidel Castro to his brother's autopsy photographs, which Robert Kennedy feared would get into tabloid newspapers.
Holland's thesis fits neatly into other recent examinations of Kennedy's death. For instance, ''Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of J.F.K.,'' a new book by investigative journalist Gus Russo, chronicles Oswald's outrage at US actions against Castro and suggests the American cover-up was fueled by Robert Kennedy's fear that this secret US policy might become public.
Holland, 47, said that previous researchers also have not given enough weight to the strong personalities that shaped the Warren Commission's final report. In his most startling example, he traces discussion of the ''second-bullet'' theory, proferred by critics who maintain there was another gunman, to John Connally, the former Texas governor who rode with Kennedy in his limousine through the streets of Dallas.
Connally's ego was so oversized, said Holland, that he could not accept the notion he was injured by a bullet that struck him only after leaving Kennedy's skull. The author quotes commission staff members as saying Connally had come to the panel's office one day with a complaint to the effect of: ''I want my own bullet, and I'm going to get it.''
Hundreds of books have been written about the Warren Commission, with even more about the assassination of the 35th US president, but Holland thinks his effort breaks new ground in its detail, its explanations of the interactions between prominent panel members, and its fresh historical perspectives. Holland based his conclusions on interviews with more than a dozen commission staffers, as well as former President Gerald R. Ford and other commission members.
Most pointedly, Holland attempts to show that the Warren Commission, long derided as ineffectual or manipulated, and more concerned about appeasing the public than obtaining the truth, did its job pretty well and, most importantly, reached the correct conclusions about what happened in Dallas.
''It's become part of our popular culture that the Warren Commission was a joke, and that's not the case,'' said Holland.
Asked if he was trying to rewrite the commission's history, he replied: ''The problem really has been that there is no history here.'' Too many past probes of the investigation of Kennedy's death, he said, ''dissolve into whodunits.''