(2007) It's a "mystery … fundamental question mark," says investigator Josiah Thompson, author of Six Seconds in Dallas: "We don't know what happened." Through the viewpoints of various individuals interviewed on camera, from archival footage and the Zapruder film, director/writer/producer Robert Stone re-examines for PBS's American Experience the question as to who assassinated President John F. Kennedy and why.

According to Hugh Aynesworth, a Dallas reporter who was on the scene, though he acknowledges there is no evidence of a conspiracy more than four decades later, the event will probably remain "an unsolved forever murder." Edward J. Epstein, journalist and author of Inquest, concurs that "after forty years none of the theories pan out." After saying he had been lured into believing a conspiracy must have been involved, even novelist Norman Mailer, recognizing that "internal evidence is not there," concludes: "You can't know because the ghost doesn't tell you."

Lee Harvey Oswald, 24 years old, had defected to the Soviet Union after leaving the US Marine Corps, returned to America as a Marxist Communist with his Russian wife Marina, apparently without raising serious suspicions. After firing his rifle three times in less than six seconds at President Kennedy, passing beneath the Texas School Book Depository in an open convertible on November 22, 1963, he fled, killed police officer J.D. Tippett, and was apprehended and charged with the murder before being shot dead the following day by Jack Ruby.

This was the official report of the Warren Commission, a group of seven men (including Congressman Gerald Ford and Allen Dulles, former director of the CIA), headed by the Supreme Court's Chief Justice Earl Warren, whose meetings were not televised but whose conclusions were intended to quiet the public's concerns and doubts. An attorney for the Commission, Arlen Specter proposed the single-bullet theory.

However, researcher and author of Rush to Judgment, Mark Lane, who as an attorney had unsuccessfully applied to the Warren Commission to represent Lee Harvey Oswald, questioned the Commission's determination that only three shots were fired and rebutted Specter's "magic" bullet scenario on a 1966 BBC program.

In rightwing Dallas a left-winger, who had earlier attempted to assassinate Gen Edwin A. Walker, a reactionary segregationist, then kills a liberal president? The doubters included President Lyndon Johnson, who distrusted the Warren Commission's report and went to his grave believing JFK was the victim of a plot by Cuban President Castro. Other conspiracy theories (unified best by Oliver Stone in his film JFK) alleged involvement or direction by CIA rogues, KGB Russian agents, and the Mafia (as in Kennedy's mistress Judith Campbell Exner's connection to Sam Giacono).

Beginning with accusations that the Warren Commission had been corrupt and inept - "tectonic shift," remarks Thompson, "something had shifted under our feet" - a cascade of interrelated events, including assassinations of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy, brought further discredit to the federal government, compounding its lack of credibility from telling the public lies about the Vietnam war to the disruptions of the '68 Chicago Democratic convention to the Nixon administration's subversion of the political process and CIA assassination plots of foreign leaders.

Then along came New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's raising questions about political motivations behind the assassination, which initially intensified the public's renewed focus before sullying (using drugs, hypnosis, and wacko codes to associate Perry Russo with David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Oswald, and Ruby) and deflating it.

Dan Rather had high expectations that an independent CBS News investigation would reveal the truth behind the chaotic accumulation of opinion and supposition. Not mentioned is the fact that other than a known conspiracy having been behind John Wilkes Booth's murder of Abraham Lincoln, nearly a century earlier (which long retained an aura of mystery surrounding its circumstances), the two previous presidential assassinations of Garfield and McKinley, as well as other attempts on the life of a US president, have been found to be the execution of an individual acting alone. Also see the bonus feature on the DVD, The Zapruder Film and Beyond.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

Patrick Ivers can be reached via e-mail at .