'JFK' and Oliver Stone's Propaganda

In his signature film, JFK (1991), Oliver Stone used almost every propaganda trick available for his thesis that Kennedy was murdered by the Military-Industrial Complex for moving toward détente.

He portrayed dingbat Jim Garrison (whose paranoid fantasies and illegal methods alienated all but the most feverish of the Grassy Knoll crowd) in Capresque terms, a Mr. Smith Goes To Washington type going against a corrupt Washington establishment. As peddled by Stone, Garrison was everything admirable - a patriot with decades of service in the military; a family man who loved and lusted after only his wife.

By contrast, the conspiracy crowd were sweaty homosexuals bathed in harsh lights that emphasized every wart and furrow.

Then and now, such tricks were not enough to bolster Stone's theory. Kennedy was not a dove seeking to normalize relations with Castro and to withdraw troops from Vietnam. Instead, he was approving sabotage operations against Castro two weeks before the assassination and had greenlit an invasion of the island scheduled for December 1963. Most wounding to Stone's monomania regarding Vietnam, Kennedy fully intended to stay the course there. In a March 1963 letter to Bobbie Lou Pendergast, whose brother was killed in Vietnam, the president argued that the U.S. must stay the course there:

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