The assassination of President Kennedy was to its era what 9/11 is to ours. What followed was a decade of governmental skullduggery, political paranoia, demagoguery and division on a scale rarely seen in American life. In the White House, a conspiratorially minded president (Lyndon B. Johnson) threw the nation headlong into a divisive and unnecessary war in response partly, to his own growing paranoia over the assassination of his predecessor.For much of the public, Vietnam and the JFK assassination became merged psychologically into a vast wellspring of mistrust and disillusionment. With the subsequent assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 and the revelations of President Nixon's constitutional subversion in the early '70s, the last hopes of American idealism were shattered. A decade after JFK's assassination, America's political culture was changed almost beyond recognition. With "Oswald's Ghost," acclaimed director Robert Stone offers an unprecedented deconstruction of the mythologies and controversy surrounding what is perhaps the most tangled and far reaching murder mystery of all time.Featuring interviews with Norman Mailer, Gary Hart, Tom Hayden, Mark Lane and Edward J. Epstein, and others, the film probes the deep psychic wounds inflicted by the Kennedy assassination on American politics and culture, the scars of which remain evident to this day.
Using a wealth of archival material, much of it never before seen or heard, "Oswald's Ghost" chronicles America's 40-year obsession with the single most pivotal event of the boomer generation.
Quietly implicit throughout the film is a haunting parable to the aftermath of 9/11.