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

society by the Cold War or active in the criminal underworld. These malignant forces
kill Kennedy and make Oswald their dupe.
During the Cold War, for the first time in U.S. history, a large military and
intelligence establishment was created to deal with the threat from the Soviet bloc. The
Cold War was an economic, political, and military struggle with serious consequences for
American society.. As the Cold War historian H. W. Brand points out, “Most perversely,
the call to arms against communism caused American leaders to subvert the principles
that constituted their country’s best argument against communism.” 2 Secrecy masked
the U.S. government’s covert, and helped feed public suspicion of authorities, especially
during the Vietnam era. Questions over the Kennedy assassination contributed to this
suspicion about government, with many Americans believing that a conspiracy was
responsible. The alleged conspirators – from across the political spectrum from the far
right to the far left – reflected uncertainty about Oswald himself.
This dissertation will look at popular books and films about the assassination from
1964 to the present to examine the different interpretations of Oswald, and show how
these reflect a politically and ideologically fractured American society. A model for this
study is historian David Greenberg’s Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image, which
describes the many images of President Richard Nixon through a variety of media,
including newspapers, political cartoons, television, and film. Greenberg explained that
“history consists not only in what important people did and said but equally in what they
2
H.W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 224,
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