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

of the assassination.” 572 Whatever his sexual proclivities, the urbane Shaw seemed an
unlikely suspect in the assassination: he founded the International Trade Mart in New
Orleans, and was a civic leader who helped restore buildings in the French Quarter.
Weisberg believed that the Kennedy administration’s crackdown on the anti-
Castro groups after the Cuban missile crisis triggered the assassination. He wrote, “If
people motivated by hate and dominated by uncontrollable passion needed any motive
other than the Bay of Pigs and the guarantee of Cuban territorial integrity by Kennedy as
his contribution to the solution of the Cuban missile crisis, the change of policy [in
cracking down on the exiles]…provided it.” 573 Oswald’s “intelligence cover” as a pro-
Castro partisan made him a perfect patsy.
Like Weisberg, New Orleans District Attorney Garrison believed Oswald was
innocent, and he brought the only prosecution in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A
grand jury indicted businessman Clay Shaw, and he was tried and acquitted in 1969.
Garrison claimed that Shaw knew Oswald, and he had a motley collection of witnesses
testifying to associations among rabid anti-communist David Ferrie, private detective
Guy Bannister, Clay Shaw, and Oswald. Garrison described his theories about the
assassination and his views on Oswald in 1988 in On the Trail of the Assassins, which
Oliver Stone would use as the basis for his movie, JFK.
572 Weisberg, 201.
573 Weisberg, 161.
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