1612-page Kennedy-assassination book published

[Cruzan]

The book’s best section, however, has to be the 276 pages Bugliosi devotes to tracing Oswald’s life from his birth in New Orleans through dozens of run-down apartments in Texas and New York — we get an address and a description of every one — his time in the Marines, his defection to the Soviet Union and eventually his fateful return to Dallas. A more intimate portrait of a loser would be hard to find. Oswald was a troubled child, a library Marxist, a wife beater and a delusional paranoiac. It’s easy to forget how young he was. At the time he killed Kennedy, Oswald was 24, a year older than Seung-Hui Cho, the killer of 32 at Virginia Tech.

It’s in the arguing that Bugliosi, as a former prosecutor, truly shines. When he gets down to the sweaty business of wrestling the conspiracy buffs, he charges into the ring as a righteous avenger, body-slamming everyone from Lane to Oliver Stone; he even throws a headlock on poor Gerald Posner, who actually agrees with him. No author is too obscure to escape Bugliosi’s attack. A Texas lawyer named Barr McClellan has sold 75,000 copies of a book that accuses Lyndon B. Johnson of masterminding the assassination; after the book was featured on the History Channel, the network was obliged to issue a statement acknowledging it was all, um, lies. Bugliosi terms McClellan’s work “blasphemous and completely false” and concludes, “Shame on a former member of the American bar for sinking to such a depth of ignominy.” Boy, remind me never to bounce a check to this guy.

Bugliosi nicely traces the rise of the conspiracy movement; authors began cranking out books attacking the Warren Commission before it even issued its report. He reminds us how early on the movement was taken over by left-wing journals like Ramparts; this is surely one of the left’s more wrongheaded crusades. Bugliosi knows, though, that more than politics is at work. He understands how badly many Americans need there to have been a conspiracy, that it’s difficult to accept that an American president, especially one of Kennedy’s stature, could have been killed by a pathetic creature like Oswald.

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[Peace Patriot]

1. He's wrong.

I recommend James Douglass' book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died And Why It Matters."

Blows all the other books away. Nails it. (CIA.) And beautifully explains and documents why it matters.

[sazemisery]

2. I agree. Douglass was spot on. eom.

[clear eye]

3. Dulles, former CIA chief, who had commissioned the CIA Cuban plots that JFK quashed

and whom Kennedy fired, was appointed a member of the Warren Commission. JFK had told people he wanted to break up the CIA. (He didn't want to be dragged into foreign relations actions and positions b/c of CIA activities covertly initiated w/o authorization.) Savvy critics from the left knew what the appointment meant even before the Commission met. They had good reason to suspect its good faith.

[Peace Patriot]

10. Yup, JFK said he wanted to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces."

He defied them on the Bay of Pigs. He refused to nuke Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He opened backchannels to Krushchev and Castro, trying to END the "Cold War." He signed the first limit on nuclear weapons--the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty--over the CIA's objections. And he was trying to arrange neutral status for Vietnam in the "Cold War" when they killed him. Three days later, LBJ said, "Now they can have their war." He was speaking of the CIA and Vietnam.

Douglass does an excellent job of explaining LBJ's behavior during these events. He doesn't think LBJ was involved in the assassination, but that he WAS involved in the cover-up (which makes him look guilty in the assassination). He says that LBJ engaged in the coverup for two reasons: 1) The CIA had laid the trail to Russia, in order to coerce LBJ into nuking Russia in retaliation (what JFK had refused to do); the CIA, the Joint Chiefs and the MIC wanted to strike Russia while the U.S. still had missile superiority and they thought the U.S. would "win" a nuclear war; they hated JFK for settling the Cuban Missile Crisis outside of channels, by withdrawing U.S. missiles from Turkey. LBJ did not want a nuclear war. He found out, early on, that the CIA had killed JFK, and knew that Russia was innocent of it. He agreed to the coverup to prevent pressure from the public or the MIC to nuke Russia. (There were layers to the coverup, and a partial revelation of the truth would point to Russia--and that's how the CIA had designed it, with a "breadcrumb" trail to Russia). 2) Because he knew that the CIA had done it, LBJ also agreed to the coverup to prevent great civil disorder in the U.S. and exposure of the MIC. An outraged American people might well have dismantled both the CIA and the MIC, if the full truth had come out. Johnson was not a man of peace, but he was a sane man when it came to a nuclear armageddon--and the rest of the MIC were lunatics, truly. ("Now they can have their war.")

One test of Douglass' theory that the Cuban Missile Crisis changed JFK from a typical "Cold Warrior" into a leader determined to get rid of nuclear weapons and create world peace, and of JFK's belief that the American people would be with him and would give him a huge mandate for peace in the 1964 election, is that LBJ--after inheriting JFK's office--ran for president on a peace platform in 1964 and won one of the biggest (and I think THE biggest) landslide in presidential history. I am acutely aware of this fact because that was my first vote for president. I voted for peace. And, tragically, what I got for that vote was the Vietnam War. That would not have been the case if JFK had lived. He was sincere in his bid for world peace. That is WHY he was killed. The post-WW II war profiteers were so entrenched by that point that they had to to have a war to justify their gigantic military budgets. Johnson gave them their war.

Douglass' book is meticulously documented, and extremely well written and compelling. No other book or work of any kind on that assassination has ever satisfied me that the author or authors had grasped the whole event, at every level. In my opinion, Douglass solves this mystery on every level.

The book is particularly brilliant in its identification of the Cuban Missile Crisis followed a year later by JFK's assassination and the relationship of these two events. They are, together, perhaps the most pivotal events in the history of our country and possibly in the history of humanity. Human civilization began with human beings learning to control fire. And it almost ended in 1962, with the ultimate fire of nuclear weapons--but for one man (and his brother--who was his only ally in refusing to nuke Russia). What no one knew at that time was that even a limited nuclear exchange would kill the entire planet within months (--disclosed much later in Carl Sagan's book, "The Cold and the Dark"). But JFK couldn't abide what the Joint Chiefs told him--that striking Russia would mean "only" 300,000 American casualties when the Russians retaliated. He stated that this was "madness" and he refused to do it. This marked him for death. And his continuance on this path over the following year--extending his goal to the proxy wars--sealed his fate.

And we have been engaged in the MIC's more "minor" wars ever since--with no end in sight. JFK's death sealed our fate as a people who cannot have peace, no matter how much we want it.

[Don Caballero]

4. Bugliosi really does make the conspiracy theorists look silly

He goes point by point of the conspiracy theory and debunks each.

[H2O Man]

5. Actually, Mr. Bugliosi

expresses respect for Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann. And their second book, published in 2009, has a large amount of documents that were not available when Mr. Bugliosi wrote his book. A person can read a variety of books that interpret events differently, without resorting to calling the authors "silly."

[Don Caballero]

6. Another great book debunking the conspiracy theories is

Case Closed by Gerald Posner. To date this work is the best in the field of debunking.

[ngant17]

8. WC apologists Posner, Bugliosi, McAdams, Von Pein, ad nauseum

Review of Gerald Posner, Case Closed:

"Massive numbers of factual errors suffuse the book, which make it a veritable minefield. Random samples are the following: Pontchartrain is a lake not a river. The wounded James Tague stood twenty feet east, not under the triple underpass. There were three Philip Geracis, not one; he confuses the second and the third. A tiny fragment, not a bullet, entered Connally's thigh. The Army did the testing that he refers to the FBI. None, not three, commissioners heard at least half the hearings. The Warren Commission did not have any investigators. Captain Donovan is John, not Charles, and a lieutenant. The critics of the official findings are not leftists but include conservatives such as Cardinal Cushing, William Loeb, and former commissioner, Richard Russell.
Posner often presents the opposite of what the evidence says. In the presentation of a corrupt picture of Oswald's background, for example, he states that, under the name of Osborne, Oswald picked up leaflets he distributed from the Jones Printing Company and that the "receptionist" identified him. She in fact said that Oswald did not pick up the leaflets as the source that Posner cites indicates.
No credible evidence connects Oswald to the murder. All the data that Posner presents to do so is either shorn of context, corrupted, the opposite of what the sources actually say, or nonsourced. For example, 100 percent of the witness testimony and physical evidence exclude Oswald from carrying the rifle to work that day disguised as curtain rods. Posner manipulates with words to concoct a case against Oswald as with Linnie Mae Randle, who swore the package, as Oswald allegedly carried it, was twenty-eight inches long, far too short to have carried a rifle. He grasped its end, and it hung from his swinging arm to almost touch the ground. Posner converts this to "tucked under his armpit, and the other end did not quite touch the ground"(p. 225). The rifle was heavily oiled, but the paper sack discovered on the sixth floor had not a trace of oil. Posner excludes this vital fact."

This review appeared in the Journal of Southern History 6 (February 1995), pp. 186-188. This electronic version from http://www.assassinationscience.com/wrone.html

[ngant17]

7. another feeble attempt at selling a lost cause (Warren Report)

This book is not recent, it has been out for some time, and it has been discredited and debunked, by Mark Lane, Jim DiEugenio and a few other JFK researchers. Nevertheless it seems that HBO and Tom Hanks wants to pick up the mantel for this sorry book now.

Cruzan is praising "Reclaimed History" but he sounds like another Max Holland again, the guy over at CIA HQ who continually is defending WC and keeps giving Bugliosi all the rave reviews. That's understandable, as Bugliosi relied mostly on long-discredited FBI and CIA material to write his book.

The lousy books sales of the hardback edition might have encouraged him to release a cheaper version, Bugliosi has now re-packaged this "Reclaiming History" in a smaller edition, a paperback called "Four Days in November", and borrows approximately 500 pages of the previous book, using the same distortions of facts and eliminating anything that might suggest even an appearance of a greater conspiracy. A smaller version of a book for smaller minds.

There are the same falsifications and half-truths. For example, neutron activation and parrafin tests on Oswald proved he never fired a gun that day. Bugliosi is in denial of that fact. He claims Clay Shaw was a liberal, but he was a fascist and a trusted asset of the CIA, one could go on and on...

I would not classify any of Bugliosi's work on JFK as historical non-fiction, and it would be placed with other fictional works.

I agree that Jim Douglass has the best book out there at this point.

[Echo In Light]

9. Un rec

[elocs]

11. Although the JFK assassination makes for interesting discussion,

the truth is that it probably does not mean much to most Americans and is not important to them. Perhaps it should be important to them, but too many people are really leading lives of quiet desperation where they are worried about their job, or having lost their job, worried about keeping their home or having lost their home, worried about health care. Most of us tend to believe that what is important to us should be important to everyone else also, but that is not the case.

Two thirds of the people in this country now were not even born when JFK was assassinated and probably another 10% were too young to really appreciate what happened at the time. I am 57 now and was just 11 and in the 6th grade then and I was only just barely beginning to understand events outside of my immediate childhood world. Add to all of this the adults who might have had anything to do with it all are either getting very elderly, dying, or are long dead.

After all of these many years I am sure I have heard everything there is to hear about the JFK assassination. It has been hashed and rehashed, turned upside down and inside out and explained with every conspiracy theory known to god or man. The truth is that JFK is still long dead and those responsible for his death got away with it and nothing any of us can do will change that.

[Hepburn]

12. WCR = POS...n/t

[PCIntern]

13. the 'brilliance' of the cover-up

was that so much disinformation was put out there, that it is nearly impossible to figure out which theory is the most likely. They knew that there were a million holes, so they proffered dozens of possibilities which confused the issue(s).

I for one was 11 years old, riding home after routine early dismissal on Fridays from my school, and within minutes after the first reports of the assasination came over the radio - 1210 WCAU in Philadelphia, reports of a 'known communist in the Dallas area" began, and continued until said "known communist" was arrested. I asked my Mom, with all the people in Texas, how did they know about this man, and her reply was, because they're not telling us the truth.

And they were not, and never shall they. The last significant remnant of all of those involved is Arlen Specter, and he's not talking.

[Ohiodemoc]

14. This is old news. This "Oswald did it alone" book was published months ago

If you believe our intelligence agencies and members of the military were responsibe for JFK's death, I engourage you to unrecommend this thread.

That book was released a month ago. This OP Seems to believe that Oswald did it alone, and is responding to an announcement yesterday of a book by Doug Horne which concludes that CIA and others were complicit in the assassination and cover-up. See it here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7379855