Acclaimed director Robert Stone (“Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst,” “Radio Bikini”) offers an unprecedented deconstruction of the assassination of President Kennedy, uncovering how this single event forever changed the face of American culture and why it continues to plague the nation’s psyche.
The film features interviews with authors Norman Mailer and Edward J. Epstein, politician Gary Hart, news anchor Dan Rather, activist Tom Hayden, attorney Mark Lane and others. Using a wealth of archival material, much of it never before publicly seen or heard, Stone chronicles America’s 40-year obsession with the pivotal event of a generation. Quietly implicit throughout the film is a haunting parallel to 9/11 and its aftermath.
More than 40 years after his death, 70 percent of Americans continue to believe that the 46-year-old president’s murder was the result of a conspiracy. Did Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old former Marine and communist sympathizer, act alone? Was he influenced by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro or a rogue element of the CIA? Did the KGB or the Russian government order the killing? “How could someone as inconsequential as Lee Harvey Oswald have killed someone as consequential as John F. Kennedy?” asks historian Robert Dallek in the film. It is that seemingly unanswerable question that continues to haunt us.
Watch it Tuesday, November 18th at 10:00 pm on PBS World.
See previews and find out more at pbs.org.
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