X (CONT'D) - "Only four days after J.F.K. was shot, Lyndon Johnson signed National Security Memo 273, which essentially reversed Kennedy's new withdrawal policy and gave the green light to the covert operations against North Vietnam that provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In that document lay the Vietnam War.
Hope I didn't ruffle any feathers by admitting I'm conservative. - (joking)
What Oliver 'Stoned' did in those films was rewrite history. You can't rewrite history without including/blending historical facts with fabrication, and presenting both equally. One can't take 'artistic license' with facts. Of course, the fantasy in "JFK" was extrapolated from hard facts and theories. It wasn't all fiction. But the end result was virtually the same, once cleverly polluted by Stone's active imagination.
My only beef with it is the 'danger' of rewriting history in a movie. It can mislead young viewers, preferring to get their history lessons from entertainment, to trust everything in a well told story (which is also the mark of a good director, as master manipulator.) For the same reason, I wonder if liberals will admit they don't buy into every word uttered in an Oliver Stone film just because it suits some idealogy, or a frustration over distrust of authority. I know, conspiracy theories are often tempting and hard to resist.
Anyway, I still enjoyed "JFK" and I thought Stone's "U Turn" was a pretty good flick.