I'm afraid that the editor has made a tremen- dous mistake in reprinting Peter Gabel's article lauding Oliver Stone's movie JFK on tikkun.org. Gabel praises JFK as a laudable effort to open up American culture to the liberating Kennedy- esque '60s cultural shift by creating a "coun- ter myth" to the "myth" created by the Warren commission to "nail down the repressive cul- ture of the '50s" before it all got out of hand. The key sentence is this: "It doesn't really matter who killed Kennedy." Au contraire! It matters tremendously who killed Kennedy. The enormous outpouring of paranoid con- spiracy theories that followed the assassina- tion has led to a level of cynicism and distrust of government since the event. I would argue that Oliver Stone did a tremendous disservice with JFK, adding to that cynicism and alien- ation. If you want the final word on the reality behind the assassination, read Vincent Bugli- osi's 1,600-page book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy or, if that is too much, read Gerald Posner's Case Closed. They may be less hip on the psycho- social, cultural analysis, but they are much better on the facts. It does very much matter who killed JFK.

-Roger Brindle, Sausalito, CA, and La Paz, Mexico

peter gabel responds:

The critical point of my essay is to understand the psycho-historical dynamics that give mean- ing to the Kennedy assassination and to learn to use this type of analysis as a way of under- standing what is happening in the world more generally. …