Three decades later and Oliver Stone is still helping to unravel the most confounding murder in our nation’s history. Stone may have won Best Director Oscars for the Vietnam War classics Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, but the auteur’s most enduring impact is arguably the role he’s played in reigniting interest in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Stone’s 1991 smash hit JFK exploded the Warren Commission’s official myth that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman single-handedly responsible for killing Kennedy, and powerfully made a case for a “countermyth” wherein rogue intelligence agents were part of a conspiracy to liquidate the president before he could pull US troops out of Vietnam.

Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and winning two Academy Awards, Stone’s dramatization spurred Congress to create the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which required the National Archives and Records Administration to review all records relating to the assassination and provide copies to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). However, many JFK documents remained classified — until President Trump released up to 80,000 pages in March.

On April 1, Stone returned to Capitol Hill to testify before the House Oversight Committee Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, accompanied by his writer and researcher Jim DiEugenio and another prominent Kennedy assassination specialist, Jefferson Morley. In this candid conversation, Stone — who also directed the 2021 in-depth documentary feature JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass  — holds forth on his appearance before Congress, new evidence unearthed from the declassified files, what he believes should be done next regarding the most red-hot cold case in American history, and more.