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

assassination. However, he was connected to forces larger than himself let loose in
American society by the Cold War, and was ultimately the victim of those forces. To the
conspiracy theorists, Oswald the Red was “the legend” of an intelligence operative or the
convenient scapegoat to mask the true conspirators. Some authors even fantasized about
a brainwashed, Manchurian candidate Oswald or offered the theory, based on discordant
Warren Commission testimony, that a double Oswald impersonated the real one to take
the fall in the assassination. The Secret Agent Oswald theories appealed to those on the
left who saw the right as the more logical ideological enemy of the president than a
Marxist Soviet defector. Government secrecy and covert activities of the Cold War fed
these ideas. A conspiracy involving organized crime or right-wing extremists made
Kennedy into a flawed but heroic and tragic victim, appealing to some of his supporters
on the left.
A final determination of Oswald’s status has implications for assessing Kennedy’s
presidency, President Johnson, and the Cold War era. The historian Richard Hofstadter
perceptively wrote of the “paranoid style of American politics,” in which “uncommonly
angry minds” throughout U.S. history have used rhetoric of “heated exaggeration,
suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” 754 Some of the more extreme theories of
conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination bear some resemblance to the “paranoid style.”
However, the rhetoric described by Hofstadter also applied to some of the key suspects in
the conspiracy theories, including rabid anti-Castroite Cubans, right-wing extremists such
as David Ferrie and Guy Bannister, and perhaps renegade Cold Warriors in the U.S.
754 Hofstadter, 3.
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