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

elease assassination-related documents. 727 However, Toplin and many other
commentators criticized film director Oliver Stone’s portrait of New Orleans District
Attorney Jim Garrison, who brought businessman Clay Shaw to trial in the assassination.
Shaw was acquitted. Toplin noted, “Far too much evidence has emerged raising serious
questions about how Garrison conducted the trial of Clay Shaw.” 728
Other commentators on JFK deplored its depiction of homosexuality. Historian
Michael Rogin pointed out that the main conspirators seen on screen are homosexuals:
Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, and a fictional composite character, imprisoned homosexual
prostitute Willie O’Keefe. Rogin wrote, “Homosexual panic displaces politics in JFK.
Stone’s Kennedy is at once the ‘father-leader’ whose killing unleashes chaos and the
beautiful young man...endangered by erotic attraction.” 729
Historian Robert Burgoyne was more positive in his examination of JFK. He
wrote that the film’s “disjointed temporality and dislocated spaces...can be read as
reflecting the distorted and irrational sense of national identity and the fragmented social
reality that the film finds at the heart of the United States in the post-Kennedy era.” 730
Whatever the strengths or shortcomings of the film, Stone’s JFK has molded public
perceptions of Oswald as a “patsy,” manipulated by dark forces in the U.S. military and
intelligence communities. Cultural historian Robert Rosenstone has written that the
727
Toplin, 47.
728
Toplin, 56.
729
Michael Rogin, “Body and Soul Murder: JFK, Media Spectacles, eds. Marjorie
Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10.
730
Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 90.
319