Oswald's Ghost offers an unprecedented deconstruction of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, uncovering how this single event forever changed the face of American culture and why it continues to plague the nation's psyche. Featuring interviews with authors Norman Mailer and Edward J. Epstein, politician Gary Hart, news anchor Dan Rather, activist Tom Hayden, attorney Mark Lane and others, American Experience uses a wealth of archival material - much of it never before publicly seen or heard - to chronicle America's obsession with the pivotal event of a generation. Quietly implicit throughout the film is a haunting parallel of 9/11 and its aftermath.
Nearly 45 years after his death, seventy percent of Americans continue to believe that the 46-year-old President's murder was a result of a conspiracy. Did Lee Harvey Oswald, a twenty-four-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 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.
Throughout the 1960's and beyond, Vietnam and the Kennedy assassination became merged psychologically into a vast wellspring of mistrust and disillusionment. With the subsequent assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968 and the revelation of President Nixon's constitutional subversion in the early 1970's, the last hopes of American idealism were crushed. A decade after JFK's death, American's political culture was changed almost beyond recognition. Says acclaimed director Robert Stone (Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst) This is a film about how we absorbed and responded to the trauma and shock of being inexplicable - and repeatedly - robbed of our sense idealism, optimism and security. In the past six years, we've watched a new generation of Americans experience that same trauma. While there may never be a last word on the Kennedy assassination, Oswald's Ghost is as close to a definitive account as has ever been made of what the assassination did to America.