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

would require a “national security cover-up” of the assassination plot after Kennedy was
killed to prevent World War III. 669
In the Kennedy assassination literature, Secret Agent Oswald has become the
main conspiracy theory. Bestselling books have linked Oswald to the CIA, the FBI, and
other agencies as part of a plot to kill Kennedy to prevent his efforts to make peace with
the Soviets and Cuba, and end the Vietnam War. This “peace thesis” received wide-
spread circulation in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Blaming the right appeals to the left, and
creates a counterfactual myth about the slain president. No one knows what he would
have done had he lived, but to many of his supporters, he would have eased Cold War
tensions and pulled out of Vietnam. Melanson and Newman also showed that it is not
paranoid or extreme to interpret the evidence of Oswald’s life as showing that he was
either a secret agent or someone of operational interest. This Oswald is much less of a
“loser.” Instead of being a failure at his marriage, his work, and as a political activist,
Oswald emerges as a cool and competent figure in Cold War intrigues, whose true social
and political identity is opposite to the official version of the Marxist Soviet defector
669 Newman, 636-637.
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