Oswald's
Ghost
The
Mortal Wound in the Body Politic An interview with Robert Stone,
director of Oswald’s Ghost
By Jay Blotcher
The
bullets that were €red into Dallas’s Dealey Plaza on a sunny
autumn morning in 1963 did more than wound Governor John Connolly
and scatter JFK’s grey matter across the street. According
to Oscar-nominated local €lm maker Robert Stone, the three shots
did further damage: they altered the landscape of American politics
for generations to come.
In
his new documentary Oswald’s Ghost—a bold, penetrating,
and even poetic meditation at a compact 83 minutes—Stone explains
how the lone gunman’s act has been subsumed by a fabled, ever-mutable
conspiracy theory that includes among its perpetrators the CIA,
The Ma€ a, Soviet Russian Communists and Fidel Castro.
Stone
brings together key reporters, historians and authors, each who
argues the identity of the person or persons who pulled the trigger
(witnesses include Tom Hayden, Gary Hart, Dan Rather, and assassination
authors Norman Mailer, Robert Dallek, Josiah Thompson, Mark Lane,
Edward Jay Epstein and Priscilla Johnson McMillan, the latter a
journalist who knew both Kennedy and Oswald.) The bracing debate
is leavened immensely by archival photos, audiotape and footage,
much that has never been seen before and is, in digitized form for
crystal-clarity, newly haunting. But the director, whose last mainstream
feature was 2004’s Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, remains
a tireless nonpartisan observer of the American zeitgeist. He is
less interested in where we were on November 22 than where we headed
afterwards. The answer, he tells us with neither mercy nor joy,
is that the assassination of our thirty-€fth president claimed two
other casualties: the American Left and our collective faith in
American politics. CONTINUE....
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