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

intelligence establishment. The skepticism toward government reflected not paranoia,
but the experiences of the American people in the 1960s onward. The government was
caught in repeated lies about the Vietnam War, Watergate, and CIA misdeeds. Many
Americans had questions about the other assassinations of the 1960s – Robert Kennedy
and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Some cultural critics have deplored a culture in which some Americans believe in
a government UFO cover-up or official complicity in the September 11, 2001 terror
attacks. However, each conspiracy theory must be evaluated separately, and the critics
mistake cause and effect. Conspiratorial thinking, while not new as Hofstadter showed,
also arose from the effects of government secrecy and lies. There are real questions
about the evidence in the Kennedy assassination, and real questions about Oswald’s true
allegiances, his connection to Cold War espionage, and his personality and mental state.
As time has elapsed since the assassination, a majority of Americans have found the
critics of the Warren Commission more believable than the official report -- what Gerald
Ford called the “Gibraltar of factual literature.”
From the beginning, however, the Warren Commission faced a skeptical public.
According to the Gallup Organization, 52 percent of the public thought others were
involved in the assassination in a poll taken shortly after November 22, 1963. By 1976,
81 percent of the public believed in a conspiracy, which Gallup attributed to the highly
publicized findings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The percentage
remained high in 1992 at 77 percent after the release of JFK and the intense debate
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