Assassinations Books

It s the 2nd book I got. I didn t order 2 ! I wrote to amazon twice: no answer. My purchases dont even appear on my account :I ve bought more than 10 books in the last 4 months/ In a nutshell: I m not too happy

While every one of Harold Weisberg's usually self-published books were awesome and informative, "Post Mortum" was his magnum opus. This massive volume is a must read for all JFK assassination researchers. His intricate examination of every minute detail of the medical evidence might not interest the casual reader, but the data he unearthed here is remarkable and priceless. I have to confess that Harold Weisberg was one of my personal heroes; the evening I spent at his home in Frederick, Maryland back in the early 1980s was one of the most memorable of my life. While he was cranky and cantankerous, with a bitter writing style that turned many people off, no one can question the invaluable contributions he made to assassination researchers. His personal courage was reflected in the way he took a bus into Washington, D.C. almost every day for many years, at an advanced age, in order to file numerous Freedom Of Information lawsuits against government agencies that fought their release every step of the way. All Americans interested in the truth about what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963 owe him a huge debt of gratitude. If the truth about who killed President John F. Kennedy is ever allowed to be known, Harold Weisberg will be hailed as a great American hero.

As the leading civilian expert on the Secret Service, I highly recommend this brilliant volume by the legendary Harold Weisberg. Of particular value are the many documents reproduced at the end of this lengthy book.
Vince Palamara
History Channel, author of two books, in over 32 other author's books, etc.

This book is the real item. Unfortunately, as Mr. Scanlon's review illustrates so many well-intentioned people, who have empathized with the Guatemalan people and the horrors they suffered at the hands of the Guatemalan army, have confused this extraordinary work of investigative journalism by de la Grange and Rico as a white-wash of military assasins. Not so! Just like all the rest of the well-intentioned folk, the authors began to cover the trial with a mutual enthusiasm that, perhaps, the army's long-standing impunity to civilian justice was about to be broken. The problem was that the facts (or lack of facts) that the prosecution presented just didn't add up to a conviction. But everyone was happy. Military officers had finally been convicted of a crime. It was an historic moment. All of us well-intentioned folk were applauding so loud that we didn't pay much attention to what the evidence really was.

But de la Grange and Rico were uneasy after covering the trial in its entirety. They began their own investigation at some peril to themselves. Because if these scapegoats weren't the real killers, whoever was had very powerful and dangerous connections to the Portillo/ Rios-Montt governement, which was the most corrupt in recent Guatemala history. It is not about defending "the military", but ditinguishing who's who in the military.

What was overlooked in our immediate enthusiasm for the fact that military impunity had apparently been broken is twofold: One, there is no such thing as a monolithic guatemalan military, but rather an institution riven by factions associated with different graduating classes of officers, by different areas such as intelligence or logistics, and by personal rivalries and animosities, that have become murderous since some former intelligence officers have turned their cold-war impunity to more profitable criminality that just mere murder. And two, what we lose sight of here with all our hopes for Guatemala and her people to have a peaceful, democratic future is that that future will remain impossible as long the judicial system can be manipulated by political and criminal powers. Without a completely independent and impartial judiciary system, Guatemala remains a street-fight without a referee.

What de la Grange and Rico have done here is to take a valiant stand for that future democracy by taking an internationally unpopular stance to which their investigation lead them. Ok,not these military officers, but, yes, perhaps some others,named and identified. The conviction had already been overturned once by an Appeals Court, but then ratified by a Supreme Court that had been stacked by the Portillo/Rios-Mont government. It is important to note that it wasn't at all an unpopular stance here in Guatemala, where there is little love for the army but where their book broke all best-sellers records and was widely praised by a population that had learned to distrust anything that came out of the Portillo/Rios-Monnt government.

For further details, please see my review and comments on the Francisco Goldman page.

I am truly sorry I bought this book, especially after reading the solid research in Goldman. In fact, the best thing you can do to know the true hagiography of the brutal beating, stoning and martyrdom of the great Bishop Gerardi is to get Francisco Goldman's well and transparently researched and well-written work of investigative reporting entitled The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?.

Goldman fully refutes this pressent deceptive work, which fails to identify sources but is clearly sourced by the same Guatemalan military which murdered the good Bishop two days after he presented a report with documentation of the decades of genocide by the Guatemalan military, which remains in power. That report was highly sanitized and expurgated and published in one quarter of its original length as Guatemala: Never Again! by the great Catholic publishing house Orbis Books, an organ of the Maryknoll Missionary Society which itself has suffered many martyrs in Guatemala and itself stores considerable documentation of the Guatemalan military regime of terror installed and supported and advised by the United States since deposing and murdering the elected president of Guatemala in the early nineteen fifties. See also Stephen Kinzer's Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Revised and Expanded (David Rockefeller Center Series on Latin American Studies) and I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala.

But above all, do not waste money on this book, which is nothing but the Guatemalan military's feeble attempt to cover up its crime of murdering brutally Bishop Gerardi. Read Goldman instead for the facts of the case, which put judicially, incredibly and asystematically military officers behind bars for their direct involvement. But as in the cases of Jean Donovan, Ben Linder, Victor Jara, Archbishop Romero and so many others, we await the fuller investigation and imprisonment of the "intellectual authors" of these crimes against humanity.

Sadly, books like this that seek to publish the truth are often ignored since they defend those who are usually seen as the oppressors. In this case, Guatemalan military officers are put to trial and sentenced in an elaborate scheme of political revenge. The book's authors admit to having gone in search of telling the story as it was told to the world -- that the Guatemalan military had masterminded the death of Bishop Gerardi. However, on finding that the evidence did not match the actual events, the authors set about trying to identify the true perpetrators of the crime. The research is incredibly thorough and merits praise. It is also a lesson on the fragil thread of evidence governments and NGOs rely on to make policy which shapes international opinion, and which when found to be unsubstantiated, remains uncorrected and is used for further political gain. This book out to be made into a movie to save those wrongly convicted. Of the three military officers in jail, one has been decapitated in prison, the other two remain there waiting justice.

John Wilkes Booth died as history records he did. He shot Lincoln, and fled, nearly escaping. He was caught, more with luck and manpower than anything else, by Federal troops and detectives in a barn near Port Royal Virginia. After he refused to surrender, one trooper took it upon himself (against orders) to shoot Booth. The bullet went through his spine. Booth was dragged out of the barn, and died a few hours later on the porch of a farmhouse. Booth was a famous man. Everyone recognized him. His autopsy was preformed virtually in public, and his body matched very well with descriptions given of him by various people.

Do not allow yourself to be convinced by amateur, opportunistic and deceitful history. The huge amount of genuine confusion and mystery which still surrounds the assassination of Abraham Lincoln should not be discounted or swept under the rug. Neither should it allow the propagation of such utterly untrue and patently false theories as this.

Yes, for many years, a mummy toured the country, reportedly the corpse of John Wilkes Booth. It was a carnival side-show. That is all this book amounts to.

I read this book from cover to cover the first time I got it and have bought 5 other copies as gifts for friends who have said the SAME THING!!! It is the BEST book I have read since THE LINCOLN CONSPIRACY, and by the way, The last 4 chapters read very much like an extension OF THAT very BOOK!! I won't give any thing away except to say that RETURN OF THE ASSASSIN-JOHN WILKES BOOTH is most assuredly a MUST READ BOOK for every Lincoln Assassination buff Bar none!!!

I have read this book from cover to cover since i got it and i am of the firm belief that the John Wilkes Booth Claimant David E. George in 1902 was indeed the real Booth and that he had escaped capture from the law after assassinating President Abraham Lincoln in Fords Theater back in 1865, and that a confederate soldier by the name of 'John' 'William' 'Boyd' was killed in Booths place!.Read this gripping book and judge for yourself!.

Today is the 44th anniversay since that fateful day when former nightclub owner and Mobster shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald in cold blood as the nation watched on television. I saw it, and it was unbelievable that the Dallas police would let him get that close. Oswald was shackled with his hands behind him and had no way to know that something like this could happen. Only in Texas, where they killed President John F. Kennedy two days earlier! In this country, a person is innocent until proven guilty, or supposedly that is the law of the land. In Dallas, it seems that Oswald had been set up to die to shut him and keep him from talking about his co-conspirators in the assassination on November 22, 1962.

He was a dead duck and a sacrifice. Ruby did not kill him because he was insane or "loved" the president. He killed him so that we would never know the truth. They had chosen him to be appointed the trigger man, although the person in the grassy mall was the real assassin. He had libed in Russia and married a Russian girl, so he was expendable and his past would make it appear as if he was the actual trigger man. I have never believed that he was, and an innocent man was shot down in the presence of the police and media with no defense. He was the person less worthy of living, according to the Mob and Ruby's bosses in the sleazy, sordid underworld in which he was a minor player. He, too, was expendable and the cancer of his prostate came in handy to set him free to die in peace and from natural causes, not gunned down as he did Oswald. The world will never forget that American justice allowed this to happen and treated it as a happenstance.

This author is giving us a first-person account of those days in Dallas from the historic and on-the-scene perspective. He knew Ruby from the days he had been a reporter on a Dallas newspaper. He saw Ruby in Parkland Hospital an hour after Kennedy was shot. That is not a happenstance. He was in on the conspiracy to kill the president and to get rid of the person who had been chosen to take the blame. Just as the person who was judged guilty of the Martin Luther King murder, James Earl Ray, who spent the rest of his life and died in prison for something he did not do. He was paid and sent off to England. How was he caught there? Some snitched on him, and he was the fall guy, the one to take the blame for something another conspiracy which succeeded.

Seth Kantor was a member of the White House correspondents whose article, HOUSTON, Nov. 21 -- "The story of President and Mrs. Kennedy's 'non-political' trip to Texas is chock full of bad timing and highly political backfires." This ran on the front pages of 'The New Yokr World-Telegram & Sun,'The Denver Rocky Mountain News,' and other Scripps-Howard newspapaer all across the country. Our local daily paper is owned by Scripps. He exposes the sinister world of Jack Ruby and his conspirators, was not believed at first, but when he made an automobile trip to locate witnesses, one was too afraid to testify because he had received three phone calls threatening him "if he came forward to tertify against Ruby." Jack Ruby got away with murder because he was dying from the cancer. His surgeons in Dallas had framed pictures on the wall of Ruby, one of his cancerous prostrate gland (how gross) and the other "a massive photograph of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald."

That imprint will always be in my sub-conscious as I was so appalled as I watched it happen on television. How on earth was that possible in the free land of which we live where we have a justice system. Texas is and has always had their own justice system, shoot first (like in the cowboy days) and ask questions later. They don't hang murderers any more with a lynch mob, but that was the practice in Texas back then to keep that victim's mouth shut as well. A chief-of-police in a small town in Tennessee once told me, "Don't you know there is no justice?" He was right; there wasn't then (1962) and there still isn't in today's society.

This book is thoroughly researched and all of the facts substantiated. The only thing lacking were more complete photo section to remind us just how horrid the happenings in November in Dallas, Texas, were and that there indeed was a conspiracy not only to kill Oswald but to kill Kennedy as well in the state of Texas. His successor was from that state, and that tells a whole lot about the coverup all these years.

Very informative, but this title is a reprint under another name of Seth Kantor's earlier version, "Who was Jack Ruby?", published in 1978. One vital piece of information missing from both editions is Nixon's associations with Ruby, Organized Crime, Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. In 1947, for example, Jack Rubenstein (aka Jack Ruby) was called to appear before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. A letter from Congressman Richard Nixon's office was sent to the HUAC asking that he be excused from testifying because he was working for his office on "gevernment business". This information was found in the FBI files after Nixon was dead and buried, I believe. There's so much more we know about Tricky Dick that was not available to author Seth Kantor at the time of his original publication. It's a disappointment that he did not seem to update this 1992 edition, but rather repackaged it under a new name. It's still a very powerful book, however.

I have to say that I almost knew what to expect when I ordered this book.

Kantor can always hold to his credit the fact that he knew Ruby before 1963 being a Dallas-ite himself.

But, I feel that he scratches the surface of what could have been a really credible and cohesive piece of work, and goes no further than pointing out the failings of a handful of Dallas Police Officers.

It should be called the Dallas PD's Misfeasance not the Ruby Coverup, because he just does not show any real evidence of a coverup other than as I said previously the failings or complacency of a few officers.

I'd still buy the book because it is reasonably priced and Kantor does give a some thought to Ruby's movements into that Dallas PD basement which he sets out very well in the book.

I never could figure out where the author, Alan Grady, came up with the title "When Good Men Do Nothing." The story of Phenix City is a story about good men who sacrificed everything. If you are interested in what happened in Phenix City, Alabama and want to know about men who did something, like Hugh Bentley and Albert Patterson, then I would suggest you pick up a copy of Margaret Anne Barnes book "The Tragedy and the Triumph of Phenix City, Alabama." Alan Grady's book completely misses the mark.

I love history and I'm one of those buffs who usually slowly juggles several eras at once, some because of mild interest and others out of a sense of obligation. Last Friday, someone at work lent me Alan Grady's When Good Men Do Nothing, telling me he was positive I would like it. I asked how long I could keep the book because I was in the middle of several rather lengthy bestsellers and would not be able to get to it anytime soon. Friday night, out of mild curiosity, I read the first page and before I knew it, I had lost two good night's sleep. My wife finally told me that I had to put the book down.
Reading the first page is akin to eating one potato chip or one peanut; don't start if you have other plans for the next several days. This is truly an incredible book, well-researched, unpredictable and with a slate of characters so bizarre, you can't believe this really happened. It did, though.
Albert Patterson was a small town lawyer in the 1950's in Phenix City, Alabama, the "Wickedest city in America". The major industry in Phenix City in the first half of the 20th century was the peddling of sin. Prostitution, gambling and almost every other vice were not only available on every corner, but most everyone in the city government and law enforcement were not only supportive of the system, but were actively participating in it. This is the story of a few good men who decided to stand up to the mob and what it ultimately cost them.
Buy this book. I promise you won't be disappointed.

As a history aficionado, I highly recommend Alan Grady's WHEN GOOD MEN DO NOTHING. It is well-researched, insightful, and gripping. Surely this book is on Alabama history teachers' list of recommendations. The book provides a window into the world of southern politics and demonstrates how geography, history, and human strengths and weaknesses make us what we are.
Additionally, the book is well-written. Mr. Grady has a way with words and seems to "turn-a-phrase" effortlessly. The writing is descriptive as well as clear.
A great read.

There s some great info hot off the press in here from only 100 days after the assasination.Of course there were many who saw smoke or heard gunfire up on that grassy knoll ,but there something about reading a journalist reporting before the warren cover was published. For instance,the doctor at parkland who said jfk's frontal throat wound was clearly an entrance wound.Many lone gunman books dont even mention that anymore because the navy Doctors in maryland changed all that talk of a wound from the front to one from the back That doctor at parkland( I recall) gave a press release just before he died (within the last 12 years)stating jfks throat wound was certainly an entrance wound He had to be close to death before he would argue against the "offical" story.A book all serious Nov 22 63 students should have.Possibly the first to question who really killed jfk.-He talks about a cartel that ran dallas from within. (PS)Having been close to a number of combat fatalities (from gunshot wounds,)AND knowing from where the direction of fire originated-I can attest that one does not need to be a doctor to be able to dissern the difference between entrance and exit wounds!

This was one of the first JFK conspiracy books to be written and no doubt one of the worst.This book does an excellent job of demonstrating that this conspiracy garbage is all politically motivated.The author spends most of the book trying to demonstrate that the sweet innocent Communists(he even tries to whitewash the Communist who assassinated President McKinley in 1901) couldn't possibly have had anything to do with the assassination.Well there was ONE Communist who had a lot to do with it!Buchanan, of course,blames evil right wing capatalists for the assassination.Some parts of the book are literally laughable.At one point Buchanan hints(but never actually says)that Jack Ruby was one of the assassins!Many blatantly false statements and claims are made,some of which Buchanan must have known were false when he made them.Another annoying feature of the book is Buchanan's frequent quoting from various European newspapers,as if to say, "if all these Europeans think there was a conspiracy, than it must be true".

Eventually people are just going to have to accept the fact that one man with a gun can change the course of history.

This book should be read by anyone who still believes in the conclusions of the Warren Commission. This long essay was first published in the Paris weekly "L' Express" in 1964. It lacks an index and chapter headings, but applies common sense to the reported stories to refute the "lone gunman" theory. A few hours after JFK's death, a suspect was arrested although there were no witnesses and no confessions! We were told Oswald was a fanatical Communist who hated America. Was this too good to be true? The fact that Oswald was never a member of the Communist party, or the "Fair Play for Cuba" group was omitted from the news reports. Never has such an intricate murder been so swiftly settled, without a confession of eyewitnesses!

Buchanan explains why neither Soviet Russia or Cuba could benefit from JFK's death (pp. 17-21). The first people to claim JFK was murdered by a Communist were just earlier attacking JFK as pro-Communist! Who was pulling their strings? Buchanan states that Oswald could only have been convicted if he was innocent (p.24)! But if he knew how the crime had happened, he would be silenced (p.26). Oswald's assassination by Jack Ruby proclaims that Oswald was not a lone gunman, and powerful forces were threatened by Oswald's existence and talking. Nothing over the last forty years has disproved this.

Buchanan recalls the political circumstances of the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. You'll find a description of these crimes, and their history, that is skipped in scholastic history books. The important point is that all were done for political reasons, and not of the assassins were crazy. Anything else is just a cover-up (see 'Time' of 11-29-1963). Page 72 explains why Oswald was not insane: he tried to escape, and plead 'not guilty' when arrested. The premeditation says it was not temporary insanity (p.73). Page 91 says the official conclusion was based on the Bethesda autopsy. (Decades later we learned that this 'best evidence' was based on the body of JFK's double, sacrificed to provide proof of a lone gunman firing from the rear. See "High Treason 2" for these pictures.) Pages 93-97 discuss the number of shots, and the impossibility of three shots in less than 6 seconds from a bolt-action rifle. A bullet that struck JFK at that angle could not have struck Governor Connally's back only a few inches lower, and remained intact.

Page 148 mentions Senator Kefauver's 1951 probe into criminal activities in New York, where the police, judges, politicians, and gangsters shared the loot. In the 1930s Senator LaFollette had a similar investigation that showed underworld forces were used by corporations against labor unions. Organized crime is often used to carry out tasks that can't be handled by legal means. The first Gallup poll had 52% believing Oswald represented an extreme right-wing group, gangsters, or some "unknown" force (p.152).

Pages 155-6 note the strange behavior of Oswald in the Marine Corps, which implies he was being trained as a secret agent. I believe it is routine to take a smart and talented recruit from the lower classes to use as a secret agent; they are expendable! While they denied Oswald worked for the FBI or CIA, nobody mentioned the obvious: Naval Intelligence. Page 178 tells of the Dallas ruling class, the how the oil business controls them.

I bought this book 13 years ago. It's been sitting around ever since. It's not that I wasn't interested in the topic: rather the opposite actually. I just never got around to reading it. I'm almost a collector of obscure and unnoticed events from World War II and from warfare in general. The assassination of Admiral Francois Darlan on Christmas Eve 1942 is one of those events that gets mentioned in history books, but usually without much elaboration beyond that it happened, and that Darlan's death cleared the field for de Gaulle, who wound up leading the Free Frech movement unchallenged. Darlan was Marshal Petain's deputy in the Vichy French government for a while, and then contrived to be in North Africa when the Allies launched Operation Torch and overran the place. He convinced the Allies (notably Eisenhower's protege General Mark Clark, and his diplomatic deputy Robert Murphy) that he was the only person who could provide stability in North Africa, and began ruling the provinces in the name of Marshal Petain, still in metropolitan France, and soon a guest of Hitler. Darlan was a shady character, an admiral who wound up being best known for his political maneuvering, and his flexible ethics--within the same year he met Hitler and pledged support to the Third Reich, and then met Eisenhower and pledged support to the Allied cause--made him a slippery character at best, and one the Allies knew they couldn't trust. His death benefited the Allies in general (though the Americans, according to the author, weren't aware of it at the time) and De Gaulle in particular, leaving him an almost completely clear field in his run for leadership of the Fighting French movement.

This book is an examination of Darlan's killing, and the events that led up to it. While this subject is fascinating to me, the book itself is so poorly written it's almost impenetrable. Verrier supposedly was a journalist at one point, but you have to wonder: if he was a journalist, did he forget how to write? Or perhaps the publication he wrote for preferred the prose in their publication so dense as to defy understanding? I don't know. One way or the other, what we get here is so unreadable I found myself falling asleep, something I virtually never do when reading a book.

This isn't helped any by the author's premise, which is (near as I can tell) that many people benefited from Darlan's passing, but none of them beyond his killer had much to do with his death. There's much discussion of various individuals telling one another that "Darlan must be eliminated" and then the author follows that with a notation that there's no evidence the individual had anything to do with the assassination. Verrier goes into excruciating detail discussing the various machinations that Darlan went through as he attempted to gain control, first of North Africa, and then of metripolitan France once the Allies liberated it. Apparently he sensed that Roosevelt would want someone pliable to run France when the Americans were occupying a large part of the country, and imagined that he might fulfill that role, edging from it into a real leadership position in the country. The author makes it clear that as far as he's concerned, it was very unlikely that such a thing would have happened. He quotes several Fighting French officialas who insisted that if the Americans tried to install some sort of government in France, with Darlan at its head, this would lead to a civil war in France. Apparently no one else at the time thought it a good idea either, other than some of the Americans who almost instinctively disliked de Gaulle at first sight. The author follows the various principles through a series of conspiracies, misunderstandings, arguments, disagreements, negotiations, betrayals, and other interactions that would be bewildering in any case: with Verrier at the helm, the whole things virtually incomprehensible.

I was looking forward to this book, and frankly I was very disappointed with it. The information it provides isn't earth-shattering in any fashion, though some of the details of the various diplomatic maneuvers might be of interest to a specialist. The writing kills any enjoyment anyone might get from the book. I know history isn't written primarily for entertainment, but I'm reminded of Barbara Tuchman's observation that if history is so poorly written that no one reads it, it does no one any good.

One last thing: this book has numerous quotes included in the text in French. It really detracted from my understanding of the book. After finishing the book I found a section at the back headed "Translations". I've never seen this before, didn't know to look for it, and find it awkward. If anyone else reads the book, you should be aware this section is here before you start.

Admiral Jean-Francois Darlan, heir-apparent to Marshal Petain, is revealed in this book to have been a key player in a pivotal episode in World War II. Behind the mystery of Admiral Darlan's presence in Algiers in November 1942 was a conflict between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on which hung the fate of France.

Darlan in fact was involved in a plan to keep Petain's Vichy government in power as a counter to the growing streangth of Communism. When the terms of the plan was revealed, they shocked all those in Britain, France, and the United States who were backing Charles de Gaulle. On December 24, 1942, the Gaullists, supported by the British Secret Service and the American OSS, and probably with the knowledge of Churchill himself, stood back while a certain "patriot" entered Darlan's office and shot him dead. Drawing on interviews and new-found sources, the author tells the full ugly story of the unknown turning point in the secret battle over who would lead France.

The 'Introduction' says Europeans wondered how the American press was forced into supporting the Warren Report (p.x). Two-thirds of Americans did not believe the Warren Report (p.xi). The reason is the facts belied the lone-gunman theory. Mark Lane (and others) were in the first wave that attacked the Warren Report. In 1975 George O'Toole published "The Assassination Tapes" that provided objective evidence for Oswald's innocence. This led to the House Select Committee that re-opened the investigation; this was followed by a new wave of books. The media's trumpeting of the lone-gunman theory does show their relationship to the Government (p.xii). Both are mostly owned by the corporate ruling class. [Americans learned about government lying in May 1960.]

This is a very readable and detailed book even if it has few photographs. It is a history of Lane's efforts at that time. When the lone-gunman theory was rejected in Europe the public was told Europeans are conspiracy-minded (p.12). When Americans rejected this theory the corporate media claimed Americans are conspiracy-minded! [The Federal government originated in the Philadelphia conspiracy of 1787 when dozens of men plotted to overturn the existing government.] The then unavailable evidence was consistent with innocence while the available statements were consistent with guilt (p.13). Censorship continued (pp.14-16). Marguerite Oswald asked Mark Lane to represent her deceased son before the Warren Commission; this was refused (p.18). The experience at JFK airport sounds like a comedy if it wasn't so serious (p.22). Was Mark Lane banned from the broadcast media (p.25)? Lane tells of other suppressions of his story by the corporate media.

This book is too detailed to mention the many chapters. The appendices reproduce the actual letters with their markings. Part One summarizes Lane's experiences after the assassination and his publishing of "A Rush to Judgment". In Part Two Lane discusses the defenders of the Warren Report and their many mistakes. Part Three discusses the testimony about the Grassy Knoll and the New Evidence about the wounds. The entrance and exit wounds could have only come from the front (neck to below shoulder, Appendix X). Why are these public documents restricted to the public (p.232, 235)?

Around 1976-77 Congress re-opened an investigation into the assassination. More evidence was now available as it was no longer censored. Many more books were published, few defended the Warren Report. One book on the JFK assassination, "The Zapruder Film" by Professor David Wrone, explained that figure in the doorway of that picture was Oswald; two movies taken from across the street showed nobody at that 6th floor window. Oswald in the doorway refutes the Warren Report and proves JFK was killed by a conspiracy that has not been exposed. One book that provided an explanation was "Act of Treason" by Mark North, a law professor at the University of Texas in Austin Texas. These later books had more facts and the experience gained from the early critics of the Warren Report.

While it seems obvious that the main reason this book was written was because Mark had a runaway, suprise best-seller with his first book and his publisher wanted a follow-up, this IS a decent volume. There is some intersting info. on Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden, as well.
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It is a good book. However, i wish that the author explored more, as well, the political influence on the information allowed to be released in the mentioned movies and art work.

As the leading civilian authority on the U.S. Secret Service (and President Kennedy's interaction with the agency), I was much interested in this book by Art Simon. I really like the perspective he takes on the case---as seen through the lens of film, art, and culture. That being said, while interesting reading, this book will not move you to any great depth. Still, I commend him for his unique thoughts on the case. vince palamara

The research that went into this book is incredible. It has been approached from a contradictory method and still reveals almost total support of the original "Skeleton Key" of Bruce Robert's Gemstone File. Every date of each event that is outlined, is backed up by newpaper and magazine articls from the New York Times, Washington Post, Look Magazine. The San Fransisco Chronicle, etc. The information concerning the events leading upto and sourrounding the assassination of JFK, portray a much more believable story then the one we have been told for decades. This book is a must to own!

As the leading civilian authority on the U.S. Secret Service (and President Kennedy's interaction with the agency), I was much interested in this book by Richard Alan. However, I only recommend this book for the collector out there...nothing earth-shattering contained herein. Vince Palamara