Jim Garrison, John F. Kennedy’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History
The re-broadcast of this program with Temple University Professor Joan Mellen is timed to coincide with the immediate aftermath of the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Now we know that even in November 2013 the vast majority of mainstream media still name Oswald the lone assassin and still discredit Oliver Stone, whose 1991 Movie JFK features Garrison’s investigation of the assassination.
Oliver Stone, in November 2013, defended his film, JFK. He said to his attackers on CNN: “There’s nothing in the movie that I would go back on,” and: “even more evidence supports my case now.” Joan Mellen agrees with Oliver Stone and supports the film. But she takes it all one step further: Mellen said in a lecture at Rider University on November 2, 2013. “From revealing the truth about the Kennedy assassination, … despite the CIA’s efforts to say otherwise, Oliver Stone’s film went on to become a historical event in its own right.”
She explains how JFK awakened so profound a response in the millions who saw the film, that people demanded that the still classified records be revealed. Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 and five million documents, photos, films, audio recordings and physical objects were released. They are now housed at the National Archives in College Park, MD. “The releases kept coming into the millennium” Mellen says but “ground to a halt under the Obama government.”
Biographer Joan Mellen met Garrison in 1969. His relentless search for the truth about who killed President Kennedy made a deep impression on her. In 1997, five years after Garrison’s death, Mellen started to work on the story of his life. Her biography turned into a new investigation of the assassination itself.
Joan Mellen is professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is the author of 22 books, ranging from film criticism to fiction, Latin American studies and biography.
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