For the film JFK, what is Oliver Stone's agenda - Essay Example

Johnson was a member of the ring that planned Kennedy’s assassination (Stone 589). So, the most critical question in this film is the director’s agenda when he was making up this film. This essay examines Stone Oliver’s agenda in the film and whether the film was received, by both the public and the media, as it was intended. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was a thrilling event that left the American people and the world startled. The world was confused the most when such an injustice in a developed world was tainted by unexplained occurrences when the assassination investigations started.

The film captures this in detail by going back to the years when President Kennedy was President and the unfolding of the events that supposedly cost his life. Among the ones captured are the early years of Vietnam War, the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis in Cuba, and the Laotian civil war (Brent 51). It was in November 22, 1963 that President Kennedy was brutally killed. It was after this occasion that New Orleans Jim Garrison and team got some hints on the assassination, and they commenced their investigation but the Federal Government publicly rebukes the developments (Salewic 80).

The New Orleans attorney is forced to close the case when the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is murdered before he could go on trial. This occurrence further startled the world as to the game which Kennedy’s assassins had launched. After this closure, the film captures the reopening of the investigation in 1966 when Garrison related his encounter to Senator Long while he was on a plane trip. The inaccuracies in the Warren commission’s report enabled Garrison to identify some conflicts.

In the film, several witnesses are interrogated by Garrison and his staff including other witnesses involved with Oswald. His informal investigations led to another suspect Ferrie, who is put on the spot when a witness testified that he saw Ferrie conspiring with Oswald, Shaw, and some Latin men to murder the President (Gary 1). Another interesting development was placed by Jean Hill who told the investigators that she witnessed the killing, and had heard four to six shots in total coming from the grassy Knoll, but was coerced by the U.S. Secret Service to testify that she had heard three shots from the book depository (Brent 52).

This revelation led Garrison team to believe that there were changes made to Hill’s testimony given to Warren commission. Garrison investigators revealed that from their logical analysis of the alleged crime scene, the shots were not made by one person; there were others who were involved in the shootouts and thus, Oswald was not the only assassin. Given that there were two close shots, there was a possibility that two more assassins were involved. Another message that Oliver was sending to the world was that the then senior government personalities and the security ring were involved in the murder.

In this case, the film reveals that Garrison discovered electronic surveillance microphones placed in his offices and meets X, a high official in Washington DC who revealed that the government, the CIA, the FBI, the U. S. Secret Service and the then Vice President Lyndon Johnson had a motive to cover up the cause of Kennedy’s death (Gary 1). Mr. X explains that president Kennedy was killed because it was