Interview: Oliver Stone Keeps Rolling

“You’re not gonna do the TIME magazine thing, where you assassinate all these people, are you? You know, they’re famous for that. John Shaw Billings, in Life magazine, in the old days. The editor did not tell you, ‘You can’t write anything positive about this conference?’ You sure?”

Well, I’m filing to an editor—

“A-ha! You can’t write anything, then.” And so, like that, Oliver Stone had resolved to remain wary of our mission. There are places where reporters from old-guard mainstream national publications (ahem) are welcomed, and then there are places like the Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy at Duquesne University’s Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law, where a reporter is received as warily as a CIA functionary. Held as gospel among the symposium’s attendees was the notion that members of a Beltway media elite, owing to a mix of incompetence and good manners and fealty, had long ago conspired to suppress forever the truth about the assassination....