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Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy
- Abstract
Even the strongest supporters of JFK, Oliver Stone’s notorious film on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, concede that it is deceptive: fabricated footage gussied up as documentary fact; fictional characters and scenes offered as proof of perfidy; paranoid insinuations about the conscious involvement of the highest officials in the land; outright lies. Yet to an extraordinary number of often intelligent people, these characterizations seem utterly beside the point. “Don’t trust anyone who says the movie is hogwash,” writes a Newsweek critic, David Ansen, “and don’t trust the movie either . . . [it] is a remarkable, a necessary provocation.” “One of the worst great movies ever made,” declaims Norman Mailer. One wonders: how false, fanciful, and downright mendacious does a work purporting to portray and interpret historical events need to be before it is not just chided but discounted, disqualified, disgraced?
Those who defend the film’s meta-purposes seem confident that if not all, then some and certainly at least one of its basal assertions of fact reflect what actually happened in Dallas: more than one person fired at the President. And if there was more than one gunman, there is prima-facie evidence of a conspiracy of some sort or another.
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