I believe with every fiber of my being that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. When I was eighteen I saw this film Stone convinced me of the opposite. Five years later, I now realize that this film was the turning point of Stone's career..not in a good way.

Before this film, Stone had made some of the greatest movies about the Vietnam War: Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. He showed us the financial underbelly in Wall Street and we completely misunderstood it. JFK is brilliant work of art and a complete mess as a film. It expresses a mood and idea very clearly It is brilliant acted, written, shot and directed. As a work of art it is extraordinary. As a work of history, its a mess.

John F. Kennedy was an average president who probably stole the 1960 election even though he did every right and Nixon did everything wrong. He lied about his health, he had no idea at concept of fidelity, he had no policy achievements as a senator and he didn't write the book he won the Pulitzer for. He had a great writer tell the story of his campaign and he screwed the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Those are the accomplishment of the Kennedy adminstration. Seriously that's it. Yes he was great for rhetoric, but LBJ accomplished more in a single year than Kennedy did in his entire term. Everything that the conspiracy is based on is on the idea that Kennedy would never have gotten us involved in Vietnam. And since you can't prove a negative, that is why he is regarded as an idol and Johnson who accomplished so much more is regarded as a failure. Because he never thought he could live up to Kennedy.

Every other assassination attempt other than Lincoln's was done by a lone gunman. In order for Stone's thesis to be true, you'd think someone in more than the past six decades would've come into public by now. No one has. No evidence has come to that effect. I can't entirely say that so much of the conspiracy theories that cover America are entirely due to Stone, but if you've seen Nixon you can pretty much see how he embraced the conspiracy side of the ledger of Ameircan history. Don't get me started on his Showtime series on The Peoples History of the United States which is a complete mess even if you do agree with ninety percent of his statements.

We need to believe JFK was killed by a conspiracy because the idea that one man can destroy an entire government and the way we say the world- is actually far more frightening. A cabal wants to bring down the President because he's threatens to change the way government does business? Frightening, but it makes a certain kind of sense. The idea that a 24 year man with no education who just doesn't like the President decides to shoot him because he's driving past his office? That's utterly horrifying. More so, because there's no order in the universe. To flip the thesis of the X-Files: "We need to believe.