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

Kevin Costner declares that the assassination was a coup d’etat with involvement by the
CIA, FBI, anti-Castro Cubans, the mafia, and Lyndon Johnson himself. Lee Harvey
Oswald is presented as an intelligence operative but his exact role in the plot is not clear.
Garrison is unsure whether he played an active role or that he infiltrated the plot and was
trying to warn the FBI. Many scenes in the conspiracy literature are presented on film –
from Oswald’s connection to Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw and his
alleged activities as an intelligence operative. Throughout the film, Stone mixed archival
footage with recreations of speculative material – angering many critics and former
officials. Stone showed as fact witness testimony that the Warren Commission had
discounted and the evidence collected by the real life Jim Garrison. In this way, he
offered a counter-weight to the Warren Commission’s own selective editing of testimony
and evidence. In some interviews, Stone said he was seeking to create a “countermyth”
to the official Warren Commission’s “myth” of the lone gunman. 684
The Warner Brothers’ film reached a vast audience – with a domestic gross of
more than $70-million – to popularize theories of Secret Agent Oswald and the “peace
thesis.” While some of Stone’s ideas were not new, he reached many more people
through his film than even the best-selling books about the assassination. Given the
success of his film and the popularity of the conspiracy theories about the assassination,
Stone presented “a people’s history” that many Americans embraced in contrast to their
skepticism about the Warren Commission’s “official history.”
684
Quoted in Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood, (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1996), 66-67.
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