The movie was played recently on TCM and even though I'd seen it before, it had been a while so I decided to watch it again. There was a significant flaw in the film that I either hadn't noticed before or had forgotten about. Early in the planning stages, Burt Lancaster's character was giving his co-conspirators a slide show about previous presidential assassinations. He stated that during the first three presidential assassinations, the Secret Service was ineffective. Apparently, the writers were unaware of the fact that presidential protection was not made an official duty of the Secret Service until 1913. Beginning with the Grover Cleveland administration, the Secret Service would occasionally provide unofficial security for the President when situations called for it and did so for McKinley during the Spanish-American War, but they were not providing protection when McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo in 1901.
During this same scene, the assassination attempt on former president and presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 was mentioned. The Secret Service did not start providing past presidents protection until 1958 and presidential candidates were not given protection until after the assassination of RFK in 1968.
Compared to the massive flaws in Oliver Stone's movie, this one was fairly mundane.
