[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

Cuba did not need to “invent” U.S. covert actions against the island, including attempts to
assassinate Castro. Newman diverged from the official account in arguing that “Lee
Harvey Oswald was the exact opposite of a deranged individual. He was a carefully
calculating political assassin, security in his inner convictions, with an immense capacity
for self-control and planning.” 214 According to Newman, “at the moment in which
[Oswald] squeezed the trigger, John F. Kennedy was a ‘criminal aggressor,’ the author of
a ‘reactionary and vicious’ policy of ‘strangling Cuba,’ who as chief of the evil CIA was
immediately responsible for arson, sabotage, and political murder.” 215
Newman accepted the idea that Oswald was attracted to Marxism at an early age,
and traced his life and ideological development. He noted that in New York one of his
teacher’s testified to the Warren Commission that the young Oswald “’had consistently
refused to salute the flag.’” According to Newman, this was “Oswald’s first public
gesture of ideological protest against the government of the United States.” 216 Oswald
told reporters in Moscow when he was trying to defect that his interest in Marxism began
in New York, when he was handed a pamphlet in 1953 protesting the impending
execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of being atomic spies for the Soviet
Union. Newman accepted the official version of Oswald’s life that during his teenage
years and then in the Marines, Oswald read further about Marxism, made statements in
support of the Soviet Union, and then tried to defect for ideological reasons.
214 Newman, x.
215 Newman, 74.
216 Newman, 15.
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