Oliver Stone, Testifying Before Congress, Is Confused for Roger Stone by GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert
Filmmaker Oliver Stone found himself confused with another man named Stone, who is also associated with the world of U.S. politics, while testifying before Congress about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Stone, the director behind the controversial 1991 political thriller JFK, was appearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets on Tuesday to advocate for the reinvestigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. The annual meeting comes weeks after the National Archives released over 2,000 files related to the Kennedy assassination.
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But the lauded filmmaker was likely stumped when Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert asked him a question about a book he didn't write.
'You wrote a book accusing LBJ of being involved in the killing of President Kennedy. Do these most recent releases confirm or negate your initial charge?' Boebert asked, referring to the declassified Kennedy documents.
'No, I didn't,' Stone replied. 'If you look closely at the film, there's no — it accuses President Johnson of being part of — complicit in a cover-up of the case, but not in the assassination itself, which I don't know.'
That's when Jefferson Morley, a JFK expert who was seated with Stone, chimed in with his expertise to see that the record was corrected.
'I think you're confusing Mr. Oliver Stone with Mr. Roger Stone. It's Roger Stone who implicated LBJ in the assassination of the president. It's not my friend Oliver Stone,' Morley corrected the Colorado Republican.
A flummoxed Boebert seemed to realize she'd lost the thread and quickly apologized.
'I may have misinterpreted that and I apologize for that. But there seems to be some alluding of, like you said, incompetence or some sort of involvement there on the back end,' she replied. 'Sorry, I'm going to move on.'
Roger Stone, a fixture in Washington, D.C. for decades, wrote a book in 2013 called The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.
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