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

movies, but claimed “she felt [Lee] sit up straight and strain toward the television set,
greatly excited.” 192 The researcher John Loken studied the Dallas-area television listings,
and questioned whether Oswald had watched “Suddenly.” 193 However, Loken believed
that Oswald may have known about the film and been indirectly been motivated by its
story of a sniper in a window preparing to assassinate a U.S. President. Loken also
argued that Oswald was motivated by two other films about political assassination, “The
Manchurian Candidate” and “We Were Strangers.” Loken found no evidence that
Oswald had seen “The Manchurian Candidate,” with its tale of Cold War intrigue,
brainwashing, and political assassination, but it was showing at a theater near Oswald’s
place of employment in 1962. Oswald also subscribed to Time magazine, which included
a review of the film that perhaps Oswald read. According to Loken, “We Were
Strangers” – film about a plot to kill a Cuban leader in the 1930’s – did show on Dallas
television, and as noted earlier, Marina claimed Oswald had watched the film.
Loken accepted the lone assassin theory, which can even be seen in the dedication
of his short study to Clay Shaw – the New Orleans businessman put on trial and acquitted
for conspiring to kill Kennedy. Loken described Shaw as “a noble man, wrongly accused
of conspiracy, whose life and reputation were ruined by the powerful.” 194 The author
also accepted the official view of Oswald as a negligible person. Loken described
Oswald as “a weak and impressionable personality, frequently imitating what others had
192
McMillan, 380.
193
John Loken, Oswald’s Trigger Films: The Manchurian Candidate, We Were
Strangers, Suddanly? (Ann Arbor: Falcon Books, 2000), 380.
194
Loken, iii.
91