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

INTRODUCTION: THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION, AMERICAN CULTURE,
AND LEE HARVEY OSWALD
November 22nd, 1963. The day still haunts the American psyche and has left a
deep imprint on American culture. More than 40 years after the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, the tragedy continues to spark controversy
and debate. Key questions remain in dispute, and a battle has taken place in American
culture over the alleged assassin, the enigmatic former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald.
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, set up a commission chaired by Chief
Justice Earl Warren to investigate the assassination after the murder of Oswald. The
Warren Commission and its supporters claimed that Oswald was the sole assassin, and
they described him in terms of a stock character of American culture, the anti-social
psychopathic loner. This portrait resonated with the history of previous assassins and
would-be assassins in the United States. As the chief counsel of the House Select
Committee on Assassinations, G. Robert Blakey, pointed out, “The typical political
assassin in the United States was a deranged, self-appointed savior, essentially a loner.” 1
To the Warren Commission and its defenders, Oswald was a malcontent with a failed
marriage and no other significant associations, a Marxist, and a little man who wanted to
make himself great through a terrible deed.
1
G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings, The Plot to Kill the President, (New York:
Times Books, 1981), 372.
1