JFK's assassination was a crisis point for American liberalism. Liberals were unwilling to accept the simple truth, that he had been shot and killed by a Communist (although Oswald preferred to call himself a "Marxist") in protest over his policies toward Castro's Cuba. They didn't want JFK to be a martyr to the Cold War; they wanted him to be a martyr to the Civil Rights movement, even though his record on Civil Rights featured much talk and little action. So they cultivated one conspiracy theory after another in the years that followed the 1963 events in Dallas, desperate to believe that their icon had been murdered by a villainous right-wing conspiracy and not, as overwhelming evidence suggests, by a lone nut who had lived in the Soviet Union. This film, made 10 years after the assassination, was just one of many attempts to persuade the public that JFK had to have been bumped off by Texas right-wingers and not by Lee Harvey Oswald. Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay, was a famous member of the '50s "blacklist" and a dedicated member of the old political left that would have wished Kennedy's memory to be enshrined as a Civil Rights hero, not a Cold War victim. The film is low-budget and is essentially twaddle; none of its assertions has ever been even remotely proved, and its "disclaimer," which states that its makers only wished to show how such a conspiracy "could have existed," is disingenuous at best. I found this movie intriguing when I first saw it at age 18; today I just find it silly.
Review of Executive Action
