intelligence." Five days later, The Washington Post ran a scathing article by national security correspondent George Lardner titled, "On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland" that used the first draft of the JFK screenplay to blast it for "the absurdities and palpable untruths in Garrison's book and Stone's rendition of it." The article pointed out that Garrison lost his case against Clay Shaw and that he inflated his case by trying to use Shaw's homosexual relationships to prove guilt by association. Stone responded to Lardner's article by hiring a public relations firm that specialized in political issues. Other critical articles soon followed. Anthony Lewis in The New York Times stated that the film "tells us that our government cannot be trusted to give an honest account of a Presidential assassination." Washington Post columnist George Will called Stone "a man of technical skill, scant education and negligible conscience." Time ran its own critique of the film-in-progress on June 10, 1991 and alleged that Stone was trying to suppress a rival JFK assassination film based on Don DeLillo's 1988 novel Libra. Stone rebutted these claims in a letter to the magazine. Richard Corliss, Times film critic, wrote: Whatever one's suspicions about its use or abuse of the evidence, JFK is a knockout. Part history book, part comic book, the movie rushes toward judgment for three breathless hours, lassoing facts and factoids by the thousands, then bundling them together into an incendiary device that would frag any viewer's complacency. Stone's picture is, in both meanings of the word, sensational: it's tip-top tabloid journalism. In its bravura and breadth, JFK is seditiously enthralling; in its craft, wondrously complex. The filmmaker ended up splitting his time between making his film, responding to criticism, and conducting a publicity campaign of his own that saw him "omnipresent, from CBS Evening News, to Oprah." However, the Lardner Post piece stung the most because Lardner had stolen a copy of the script. Stone recalls, "He had the first draft, and I went through probably six or seven drafts." Upon theatrical release, it polarized critics. The New York Times ran an article by Bernard Weinraub entitled, "Hollywood Wonders If Warner Brothers let JFK Go Too Far." The article called for intervention by the studio: "At what point does a studio exercise its leverage and blunt the highly charged message of a film maker like Oliver Stone?" The newspaper also ran a