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

Stone strongly defended JFK, and the film had its admirers. Stone penned a
series of articles to various newspapers in a point by point rebuttal of his critics, but his
most wide-ranging defense came in an address to the National Press Club in Washington
on January 15, 1992. Stone declared he had a right to explore the Kennedy assassination
because “there is no accepted history of these events.” 716 He asked a series of questions
about Oswald: “Its it sacred history that this semi-literate high school dropout from Fort
Worth, Texas, professing Marxism, was taken into a secret, highly-trained Marine unit at
an air base where the U-2 flights originated in Japan?” 717 Stone raised similar questions
about Oswald’s life from his defection to his death, all suggesting the alleged assassin
was connected to U.S. intelligence. Stone declared that the Warren Commission version
of Oswald’s life and the assassination “is not history, this is myth.” 718 Stone criticized
journalists at the leading U.S. newspapers for failing to investigate the assassination.
Stone also explained that the central issue of the film was how it related to the
Vietnam War. He called the war the “watershed of our time and the divisions of our
country among our people opened up by it seems to gape wider and wider with each
passing year.” 719 He praised L. Fletcher Prouty and historian John Newman, who would
later write Oswald and the CIA, for their work documenting Kennedy’s plans to withdraw
from Vietnam and the reversal of policy under Johnson. Stone said he was attempting in
the film “to open a stall in the marketplace of ideas and offer a version of what might
716 JFK: The Book of the Film, 403.
717 JFK: The Book of the Film, 404.
718 JFK: The Book of the Film, 405.
719 JFK: The Book of the Film, 406.
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