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Manhunt Finale Recap: The Verdict
The finale makes a good case for Andrew Johnson being the real villain.
Yes, Conover really made deep connections between Booth and officers of the Confederacy on the stand but what’s depicted here as a discrediting lapse in memory (seemingly paid for by Sanders) was actually revealed to have been wholesale perjury. But like JFK before it, Manhunt ’s less interested in getting all the facts right than presenting what Oliver Stone called a “countermyth.” We’ve received romantic stories shoring up the myth of the Lost Cause, the nobleness of the Confederacy, the kindness of some slave owners and the contentment of those they enslaved, the true reason for the war being something othet than slavery, for years. • It’s a frustrating element of a good but somewhat anticlimactic final episode, which kind of rushes through the trial, the collapse of the grand conspiracy charge, and Johnson’s attempt to remove Stanton and suffers a little from the absence of Booth.
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