Oswald's
Ghost
The
Mortal Wound in the Body Politic An interview with Robert Stone,
director of Oswald’s Ghost
By Jay Blotcher
ROLL:
Elaborate on the charge that the assassination ultimately undermined
the agenda and credibility of the American political left.
ROBERT
STONE: It started when Oswald was arrested and it was demonstrated
that he was a Communist, and he had gone to Russia and all that
kind of stuff. And this [assassination] taking place in Dallas,
which was a hotbed of right-wing extremism. Many people on the left
just couldn’t get their head around that. We’re coming
out of the 1950s and the whole McCarthy era is pretty fresh in people’s
minds, and the idea that a leftist had gone and shot John F. Kennedy
was appalling. And it just seemed like a setup. Now Mark Lane [attorney
for Oswald’s mother Marguerite] was a Socialist, certainly.
He had worked for the offshoot of the Daily Worker [Communist newspaper].
He had worked for the only elected Socialist congressman. He was
of that thing. Many people around him that started the idea that
there was a bigger plot—a right-wing plot to blame the left—were
from that political persuasion. This idea became adopted by a larger
portion of the American public (not just the left, but predominantely
by the left) and was very, very prevalent by student activists,
the youth movement and the counterculture of that time. You even
ask today if Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman or was it a conspiracy,
and it’s like duh, of course it was a conspiracy. You take
it for granted. That, compounded, by the assassination of Martin
Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, drove a lot of people out of engaging
in the political process.
ROLL:
When did your research on this documentary begin?
CONTINUE....
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