David Von Pein
2007-05-02 00:27:54 UTC
EXCERPTS OF A PRE-RELEASE REVIEW FOR VINCENT BUGLIOSI'S JFK BOOK,
"RECLAIMING HISTORY";
APPEARING IN "THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY" (June 2007 Issue);
REVIEW WRITTEN BY:
THOMAS MALLON (Author of "Mrs. Paine's Garage")
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200706/mallon-JFK
===================================
"The most exhaustive book yet written about the Kennedy assassination
should lay the conspiracy theories to rest once and for all-but it
won't."
===================================
"Vincent Bugliosi, the assistant district attorney who put Charles
Manson away and later produced the most merciless book on O.J. Simpson
('Outrage'), has in one way or another been working on 'Reclaiming
History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy' for 21 years,
ever since he acted as the prosecutor in an elaborate mock trial of
Oswald that was filmed in London and included Ruth Paine among its
"witnesses." Bugliosi got a conviction and never really left the case.
The result is a text far larger and heavier than any that Oswald may
have handled in the hours before he pointed his gun out a sixth-floor
window of the book depository. Indeed, 'Reclaiming History', whose
first draft was handwritten on legal pads, is longer than the Warren
Report, William Manchester's 'The Death of a President', and Gerald
Posner's 'Case Closed'-combined.
After putting the book's two sets of footnotes (which run 1,128 pages)
onto a CD-ROM, the publisher, W. W. Norton, managed to get the
principal 1,664 densely typeset pages into a single volume, no doubt
by calling on the same compressive binding skills that allow the
company to produce its massive well-known literary anthologies.
'Reclaiming History' is a magnificent and, in many ways, appalling
achievement, a work that, for all the author's liveliness and
pugnacity, is destined to be more referenced than read. Bugliosi
insists that, in the face of America's widespread and misplaced belief
in the existence of a conspiracy against JFK's life, "overkill in this
book is historically necessary."
This undue elaboration includes, one supposes, the work's primer on
the civil-rights movement (as context for Kennedy's own activity in
that realm); its long history of the Mafia that Jack Ruby was not part
of; nine pages on the Bay of Pigs invasion that did not motivate Fidel
Castro to kill Kennedy; and four paragraphs on the oil-depletion
allowance, whose reduction, unsought by Kennedy, did not drive the
Texas oilman H. L. Hunt to murder the president.
If there was no second gunman, there was, Bugliosi proves, a second
soda machine in the book depository, which undermines Oswald's claim
of having gone, minutes after the assassination, from the first floor
to the second in search of a bottle of pop. (Moreover, his preferred
brand, Dr. Pepper, was in the first-floor machine, not the second.)
Bugliosi also corrects one account claiming that in 1969, it took a
New Orleans jury only 45 minutes to acquit Clay Shaw, the man Jim
Garrison framed for Kennedy's murder. (It took the jury 54 minutes.)
And Bugliosi writes that my own book {"Mrs. Paine's Garage"}, while
correctly assessing a piece of his strategy in the London mock trial,
has him "beaming with delight" over Paine's testimony, whereas in fact
he responded with only "a measured smile."
Bugliosi has a confidence that makes Schwarzenegger, or Popeye, seem
diffident. He finds that "plain incompetence ... from the highest levels
on down, is endemic in our society," and he takes up arms against the
"pure myth" that one cannot prove a negative. "I am never elliptical
and always state the obvious," he declares, not without charm.
He has great hopes for "the stature of this book," which would derive
chiefly from its ability "to turn the percentages around in the
debate," a reversal that would leave 75 percent of Americans believing
Oswald acted on his own and only 19 percent thinking there was a
conspiracy to kill Kennedy. "My only master and my only mistress are
the facts and objectivity," Bugliosi declares, as if once more being
sworn in at the DA's office in Los Angeles.
In at least one way, he's up against both sides, CT and LN,
simultaneously. When Gerald Posner published 'Case Closed' in 1993-two
years after belief in a Kennedy-assassination conspiracy had its
widest and wildest dissemination with the release of Oliver Stone's
'JFK'-the book received a tremendously positive response, at least in
the mainstream media.
It may not have shifted those percentages, but its argument that
Oswald acted alone-of which the author became convinced only midway
through his labors-had a kind of weird freshness, given that the
Warren Report, for most of the 30 years since its appearance, had
attracted fewer defenders than the tax code. So, isn't Bugliosi
writing 'Case Still Closed', however many steroids he may have pumped
into the original orthodoxy?
Not at all, he argues. For starters, one needs a law-enforcement
background, not just Posner's lawyerly one, to make sense of
everything. Posner may have accomplished a few things-such as helping
to knock down the actuarially risible belief that there have been a
hundred or so "mysterious deaths" among people who supposedly knew too
much-but by Bugliosi's lights, Posner's methods are sometimes as
slippery as the CTs'. He accuses his LN predecessor of distortion and
credit-grabbing, especially when it comes to rehabilitating the single-
bullet theory (Bugliosi prefers calling it a "fact").
In a passage that reads like a memo to his own publisher, arguing for
the novelty of what he's doing, Bugliosi writes that his is "the first
anti-conspiracy 'book'," since all Posner's does is take an "anti-
conspiracy 'position'," devoting a mere "8 percent" of its measly 607
pages to knocking down conspiracist notions.
There's no question that Bugliosi succeeds in scorching the CT terrain
with ferocious, even definitive, plausibility. He also, by the time
his admirable 2,792 pages are through, drowns himself in a kind of
ghastly historical irony.
Before he can begin dispatching the CTs' frauds and follies, Bugliosi
must deal with Lee Harvey Oswald himself, who remains a ghost in even
the more fantastic machines of the conspiracists. Across 275 pages of
biography, and another 316 of narrative devoted to the climactic "Four
Days in November," Bugliosi's Oswald, for all his deprivations and
dyslexia, emerges as an intelligent, ill-humored, and remarkably
strong-willed young man, one who lapped up ideology and had delusions
of attaining power but was otherwise lacking in ordinary appetites "or
any of the myriad personal characteristics or eccentricities that are
so very human."
Oswald spent his childhood tagging along on the aggrieved
peregrinations of his mother, Marguerite, who would one day take
offense when her son was denied burial in Arlington National Cemetery.
But Bugliosi's sympathies, which can be surprisingly tender and
thoughtful, extend even to her and to the attempts she made to provide
for her sons in a world she believed was dead set against her.
Marguerite can, in fact, be viewed as the mother not only of Oswald
but of CTs everywhere.
The author gives proper centrality both to Oswald's near-success in
killing the far-right-wing General Edwin Walker in the spring of 1963-
an assault much more carefully planned than Oswald's strike against
Kennedy-and to his humiliating rebuff, that September in Mexico City,
by the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban consulate, when he tried to secure
a visa for travel to Havana. In the weeks before the assassination, he
was a man running out of flamboyant gestures.
Bugliosi says that he doesn't read fiction, but he favors what might
be called a novelist's view of Oswald over any unified prosecutorial
theory of the case and perpetrator.
The same Oswald who played with his children and Paine's after
rewrapping his rifle the night before the assassination would 18 hours
later fire an extra shot into the head of Officer Tippit, who had
already fallen helpless to the pavement; the same Oswald who killed
the leader of the free world could complain a day later about the
denial of his "hygienic rights" (he wanted a shower).
These were the "personal characteristics or eccentricities" that made
him "so very human," and Bugliosi, to his credit, is never rattled or
deterred by their violent juxtaposition.
Bugliosi notes that incompetence is "so very common in life," so it's
not surprising that he finds some "investigative sloppiness" to have
occurred even in an inquiry headed by a chief justice of the United
States. But occasional clumsiness-amid far more exhaustiveness and
skill-does not equal cover-up (the usual CT charge) by the Warren
Commission, whose august members shrank from fighting back when their
report came under attack.
Bugliosi also analyzes Kennedy's much-flawed autopsy and finds that
its "main conclusion" still stands. He even praises the Dallas police
who, but for the matter of allowing Oswald to be killed, succeeded in
swiftly compiling a mass of evidence against him. Captain Will Fritz,
who'd once helped hunt down Bonnie and Clyde and who conducted much of
Oswald's interrogation, emerges as a kind of low-key hero.
Toward the assassination's host of investigators, Bugliosi displays a
forbearance of human frailty and simple mistakes. What he doesn't
abide are lapses in logic, against which he displays a prosecutor's
natural preference for cross-examination over direct.
Once or twice his own logic flags, and he explains away some
exculpatory-seeming fact as part of Oswald's attempt to construct an
alibi; but much more typically, for dozens-no, hundreds-of pages at a
time, he exhilarates the reader with rat-a-tat annihilations of
others' false premises and shaky inferences.
He makes clear, for instance, that Kennedy's Parkland doctors, whose
memories of their work on the president are much loved by many CTs,
are bad witnesses; on November 22, 1963, they were making a futile
attempt to resuscitate the president, not to do ballistic analysis.
(What's more, they were largely young and inexperienced, because most
of their senior colleagues were in Galveston at a medical conference.)
Similarly, and with all due respect, Governor Connally, who never
believed the single-bullet theory, was hardly in a position to be a
careful observer while that bullet was working its way through him.
And to take one more example: On Sunday morning, November 24, Oswald
helped delay his own transfer from the Dallas city lockup to the
county jail by requesting a different shirt, thereby giving Ruby time
to arrive at the police station and kill him-an unwitting consequence,
Bugliosi reasons, "unless Oswald was a party to the conspiracy to
murder himself."
Worse than gaps in reasoning, however, are instances of bad faith,
which make Bugliosi livid. He will toss the bones of compliments to
any number of CTs-Walt Brown has a "good mind," Harold Weisberg is a
"decent rascal," and Penn Jones Jr. was "motivated by patriotism"-but
Lord help those he finds manipulating quotations, telling outright
lies, or depending on portions of the Warren Report when they're
otherwise trashing it.
Oliver Stone, always the ne plus ultra of disingenuousness, is by
Bugliosi's reckoning guilty of a "cultural crime" committed through a
thousand manipulations, among them the use of a smoke machine to
generate a puff of rifle smoke from the Grassy Knoll that 'JFK'
presents as being visible to people in Dealey Plaza.
In the course of all his refutations, Bugliosi frequently writes as if
he were delivering the world's longest jury summation. He asks the
"folks" who are reading to "please get this," or to sit tight and
"wait awhile" for an important point he's making.
He eventually runs out of sarcastic formulations for what he's up
against-the "room temperature" IQs required to believe stuff that's as
crazy as the idea that "alligators can do the polka"-but in the end it
is the weight of Bugliosi's analysis, not his rhetoric, that crushes a
long list of libels and suppositions: the sightings of a "Second
Oswald"; the "acoustic evidence" (from a police Dictabelt) that some
believe recorded four shots instead of the Warren Report's three; the
CT assertion that Kennedy's head immediately moved backward (it
didn't) when he was fatally shot from the front (he wasn't).
These last matters are at least potentially fundamental. And yet, in
order to make this "the first anti-conspiracy 'book'," Bugliosi-who
writes that "any denial of Oswald's guilt is not worthy of serious
discussion"-spends a vast acreage of print debunking the fringiest and
most lunatic theories, marshaling facts to prove that Kennedy's corpse
wasn't altered ("the conspirators would have needed at least three
separate teams of plastic surgeons waiting in hiding"); that the
Zapruder film wasn't tampered with; that the president wasn't
accidentally shot from behind by a Secret Service agent; and that the
shiny "Badge Man," who in one photograph appears to be perched on the
Grassy Knoll, is probably a Coke bottle. (Not Dr. Pepper?)
All this disputation may add heft, but it's not likely to give
'Reclaiming History' the "stature" that Bugliosi seeks for it. Its
effect, peculiarly, is to magnify much of the nonsense on this subject
that has cluttered the public mind for more than 40 years.
The writing and preservation of history is no less replete with
paradox than history itself. James L. Swanson, author of the recent
book Manhunt, about the search for Lincoln's assassin, nicely argues
that the restored Ford's Theatre is ultimately more a monument to John
Wilkes Booth than to Abraham Lincoln. Similarly, in knocking down the
conspiracists' shantytown of constructs, Bugliosi has had to save the
village in order to destroy it, and his book, if it has the longevity
it deserves, will be a kind of eternal flame running on the very gases
it thought it had capped."
=============
[END REVIEW.]
=============
A very nice review by Mr. Mallon, IMO. The two portions I like the
best are:
1.) The information that Bugliosi reveals about there being a soda
machine (with Dr. Pepper availability) on the FIRST floor of the Book
Depository on the day of the assassination. This is something I had no
knowledge of whatsoever. I had thought that the ONLY soda machine in
the TSBD was on the second floor.
And I have no doubt that Vince has checked his facts regarding this
first-floor soda machine (and the fact that the first-floor machine--
not the one on the 2nd Floor--offered Oswald's preferred drink, Dr.
Pepper).
One of the main reasons I have no qualms about believing this
information is this motto of VB's:
"If there's one thing I take pride in, it's that I never, ever make a
charge without supporting it. You might not agree with me, but I
invariably offer an enormous amount of support for my position." --
VINCENT BUGLIOSI
2.) [Mallon On] -- "But Lord help those he {VB} finds manipulating
quotations, telling outright lies, or depending on portions of the
Warren Report when they're otherwise trashing it. Oliver Stone, always
the ne plus ultra of disingenuousness, is by Bugliosi's reckoning
guilty of a "cultural crime" committed through a thousand
manipulations, among them the use of a smoke machine to generate a
puff of rifle smoke from the Grassy Knoll that JFK presents as being
visible to people in Dealey Plaza." -- [/Mallon Off]
Hooray for Vincent T. Bugliosi here! That's just exactly the type of
Stone-bashing I was hoping for in "Reclaiming History". ....
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.conspiracy.jfk/msg/2fa93b6e293e5e96
I'm looking forward to reading the entire Stone-wrecking chapter,
which should have me smiling from ear to ear for days (or weeks).
Thank you, Mr. Mallon, for an excellent and well-written (and
objective) review of "Reclaiming History: The Assassination Of
President John F. Kennedy".
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.conspiracy.jfk/msg/0bcdfcf65f6cb26f
"RECLAIMING HISTORY";
APPEARING IN "THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY" (June 2007 Issue);
REVIEW WRITTEN BY:
THOMAS MALLON (Author of "Mrs. Paine's Garage")
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200706/mallon-JFK
===================================
"The most exhaustive book yet written about the Kennedy assassination
should lay the conspiracy theories to rest once and for all-but it
won't."
===================================
"Vincent Bugliosi, the assistant district attorney who put Charles
Manson away and later produced the most merciless book on O.J. Simpson
('Outrage'), has in one way or another been working on 'Reclaiming
History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy' for 21 years,
ever since he acted as the prosecutor in an elaborate mock trial of
Oswald that was filmed in London and included Ruth Paine among its
"witnesses." Bugliosi got a conviction and never really left the case.
The result is a text far larger and heavier than any that Oswald may
have handled in the hours before he pointed his gun out a sixth-floor
window of the book depository. Indeed, 'Reclaiming History', whose
first draft was handwritten on legal pads, is longer than the Warren
Report, William Manchester's 'The Death of a President', and Gerald
Posner's 'Case Closed'-combined.
After putting the book's two sets of footnotes (which run 1,128 pages)
onto a CD-ROM, the publisher, W. W. Norton, managed to get the
principal 1,664 densely typeset pages into a single volume, no doubt
by calling on the same compressive binding skills that allow the
company to produce its massive well-known literary anthologies.
'Reclaiming History' is a magnificent and, in many ways, appalling
achievement, a work that, for all the author's liveliness and
pugnacity, is destined to be more referenced than read. Bugliosi
insists that, in the face of America's widespread and misplaced belief
in the existence of a conspiracy against JFK's life, "overkill in this
book is historically necessary."
This undue elaboration includes, one supposes, the work's primer on
the civil-rights movement (as context for Kennedy's own activity in
that realm); its long history of the Mafia that Jack Ruby was not part
of; nine pages on the Bay of Pigs invasion that did not motivate Fidel
Castro to kill Kennedy; and four paragraphs on the oil-depletion
allowance, whose reduction, unsought by Kennedy, did not drive the
Texas oilman H. L. Hunt to murder the president.
If there was no second gunman, there was, Bugliosi proves, a second
soda machine in the book depository, which undermines Oswald's claim
of having gone, minutes after the assassination, from the first floor
to the second in search of a bottle of pop. (Moreover, his preferred
brand, Dr. Pepper, was in the first-floor machine, not the second.)
Bugliosi also corrects one account claiming that in 1969, it took a
New Orleans jury only 45 minutes to acquit Clay Shaw, the man Jim
Garrison framed for Kennedy's murder. (It took the jury 54 minutes.)
And Bugliosi writes that my own book {"Mrs. Paine's Garage"}, while
correctly assessing a piece of his strategy in the London mock trial,
has him "beaming with delight" over Paine's testimony, whereas in fact
he responded with only "a measured smile."
Bugliosi has a confidence that makes Schwarzenegger, or Popeye, seem
diffident. He finds that "plain incompetence ... from the highest levels
on down, is endemic in our society," and he takes up arms against the
"pure myth" that one cannot prove a negative. "I am never elliptical
and always state the obvious," he declares, not without charm.
He has great hopes for "the stature of this book," which would derive
chiefly from its ability "to turn the percentages around in the
debate," a reversal that would leave 75 percent of Americans believing
Oswald acted on his own and only 19 percent thinking there was a
conspiracy to kill Kennedy. "My only master and my only mistress are
the facts and objectivity," Bugliosi declares, as if once more being
sworn in at the DA's office in Los Angeles.
In at least one way, he's up against both sides, CT and LN,
simultaneously. When Gerald Posner published 'Case Closed' in 1993-two
years after belief in a Kennedy-assassination conspiracy had its
widest and wildest dissemination with the release of Oliver Stone's
'JFK'-the book received a tremendously positive response, at least in
the mainstream media.
It may not have shifted those percentages, but its argument that
Oswald acted alone-of which the author became convinced only midway
through his labors-had a kind of weird freshness, given that the
Warren Report, for most of the 30 years since its appearance, had
attracted fewer defenders than the tax code. So, isn't Bugliosi
writing 'Case Still Closed', however many steroids he may have pumped
into the original orthodoxy?
Not at all, he argues. For starters, one needs a law-enforcement
background, not just Posner's lawyerly one, to make sense of
everything. Posner may have accomplished a few things-such as helping
to knock down the actuarially risible belief that there have been a
hundred or so "mysterious deaths" among people who supposedly knew too
much-but by Bugliosi's lights, Posner's methods are sometimes as
slippery as the CTs'. He accuses his LN predecessor of distortion and
credit-grabbing, especially when it comes to rehabilitating the single-
bullet theory (Bugliosi prefers calling it a "fact").
In a passage that reads like a memo to his own publisher, arguing for
the novelty of what he's doing, Bugliosi writes that his is "the first
anti-conspiracy 'book'," since all Posner's does is take an "anti-
conspiracy 'position'," devoting a mere "8 percent" of its measly 607
pages to knocking down conspiracist notions.
There's no question that Bugliosi succeeds in scorching the CT terrain
with ferocious, even definitive, plausibility. He also, by the time
his admirable 2,792 pages are through, drowns himself in a kind of
ghastly historical irony.
Before he can begin dispatching the CTs' frauds and follies, Bugliosi
must deal with Lee Harvey Oswald himself, who remains a ghost in even
the more fantastic machines of the conspiracists. Across 275 pages of
biography, and another 316 of narrative devoted to the climactic "Four
Days in November," Bugliosi's Oswald, for all his deprivations and
dyslexia, emerges as an intelligent, ill-humored, and remarkably
strong-willed young man, one who lapped up ideology and had delusions
of attaining power but was otherwise lacking in ordinary appetites "or
any of the myriad personal characteristics or eccentricities that are
so very human."
Oswald spent his childhood tagging along on the aggrieved
peregrinations of his mother, Marguerite, who would one day take
offense when her son was denied burial in Arlington National Cemetery.
But Bugliosi's sympathies, which can be surprisingly tender and
thoughtful, extend even to her and to the attempts she made to provide
for her sons in a world she believed was dead set against her.
Marguerite can, in fact, be viewed as the mother not only of Oswald
but of CTs everywhere.
The author gives proper centrality both to Oswald's near-success in
killing the far-right-wing General Edwin Walker in the spring of 1963-
an assault much more carefully planned than Oswald's strike against
Kennedy-and to his humiliating rebuff, that September in Mexico City,
by the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban consulate, when he tried to secure
a visa for travel to Havana. In the weeks before the assassination, he
was a man running out of flamboyant gestures.
Bugliosi says that he doesn't read fiction, but he favors what might
be called a novelist's view of Oswald over any unified prosecutorial
theory of the case and perpetrator.
The same Oswald who played with his children and Paine's after
rewrapping his rifle the night before the assassination would 18 hours
later fire an extra shot into the head of Officer Tippit, who had
already fallen helpless to the pavement; the same Oswald who killed
the leader of the free world could complain a day later about the
denial of his "hygienic rights" (he wanted a shower).
These were the "personal characteristics or eccentricities" that made
him "so very human," and Bugliosi, to his credit, is never rattled or
deterred by their violent juxtaposition.
Bugliosi notes that incompetence is "so very common in life," so it's
not surprising that he finds some "investigative sloppiness" to have
occurred even in an inquiry headed by a chief justice of the United
States. But occasional clumsiness-amid far more exhaustiveness and
skill-does not equal cover-up (the usual CT charge) by the Warren
Commission, whose august members shrank from fighting back when their
report came under attack.
Bugliosi also analyzes Kennedy's much-flawed autopsy and finds that
its "main conclusion" still stands. He even praises the Dallas police
who, but for the matter of allowing Oswald to be killed, succeeded in
swiftly compiling a mass of evidence against him. Captain Will Fritz,
who'd once helped hunt down Bonnie and Clyde and who conducted much of
Oswald's interrogation, emerges as a kind of low-key hero.
Toward the assassination's host of investigators, Bugliosi displays a
forbearance of human frailty and simple mistakes. What he doesn't
abide are lapses in logic, against which he displays a prosecutor's
natural preference for cross-examination over direct.
Once or twice his own logic flags, and he explains away some
exculpatory-seeming fact as part of Oswald's attempt to construct an
alibi; but much more typically, for dozens-no, hundreds-of pages at a
time, he exhilarates the reader with rat-a-tat annihilations of
others' false premises and shaky inferences.
He makes clear, for instance, that Kennedy's Parkland doctors, whose
memories of their work on the president are much loved by many CTs,
are bad witnesses; on November 22, 1963, they were making a futile
attempt to resuscitate the president, not to do ballistic analysis.
(What's more, they were largely young and inexperienced, because most
of their senior colleagues were in Galveston at a medical conference.)
Similarly, and with all due respect, Governor Connally, who never
believed the single-bullet theory, was hardly in a position to be a
careful observer while that bullet was working its way through him.
And to take one more example: On Sunday morning, November 24, Oswald
helped delay his own transfer from the Dallas city lockup to the
county jail by requesting a different shirt, thereby giving Ruby time
to arrive at the police station and kill him-an unwitting consequence,
Bugliosi reasons, "unless Oswald was a party to the conspiracy to
murder himself."
Worse than gaps in reasoning, however, are instances of bad faith,
which make Bugliosi livid. He will toss the bones of compliments to
any number of CTs-Walt Brown has a "good mind," Harold Weisberg is a
"decent rascal," and Penn Jones Jr. was "motivated by patriotism"-but
Lord help those he finds manipulating quotations, telling outright
lies, or depending on portions of the Warren Report when they're
otherwise trashing it.
Oliver Stone, always the ne plus ultra of disingenuousness, is by
Bugliosi's reckoning guilty of a "cultural crime" committed through a
thousand manipulations, among them the use of a smoke machine to
generate a puff of rifle smoke from the Grassy Knoll that 'JFK'
presents as being visible to people in Dealey Plaza.
In the course of all his refutations, Bugliosi frequently writes as if
he were delivering the world's longest jury summation. He asks the
"folks" who are reading to "please get this," or to sit tight and
"wait awhile" for an important point he's making.
He eventually runs out of sarcastic formulations for what he's up
against-the "room temperature" IQs required to believe stuff that's as
crazy as the idea that "alligators can do the polka"-but in the end it
is the weight of Bugliosi's analysis, not his rhetoric, that crushes a
long list of libels and suppositions: the sightings of a "Second
Oswald"; the "acoustic evidence" (from a police Dictabelt) that some
believe recorded four shots instead of the Warren Report's three; the
CT assertion that Kennedy's head immediately moved backward (it
didn't) when he was fatally shot from the front (he wasn't).
These last matters are at least potentially fundamental. And yet, in
order to make this "the first anti-conspiracy 'book'," Bugliosi-who
writes that "any denial of Oswald's guilt is not worthy of serious
discussion"-spends a vast acreage of print debunking the fringiest and
most lunatic theories, marshaling facts to prove that Kennedy's corpse
wasn't altered ("the conspirators would have needed at least three
separate teams of plastic surgeons waiting in hiding"); that the
Zapruder film wasn't tampered with; that the president wasn't
accidentally shot from behind by a Secret Service agent; and that the
shiny "Badge Man," who in one photograph appears to be perched on the
Grassy Knoll, is probably a Coke bottle. (Not Dr. Pepper?)
All this disputation may add heft, but it's not likely to give
'Reclaiming History' the "stature" that Bugliosi seeks for it. Its
effect, peculiarly, is to magnify much of the nonsense on this subject
that has cluttered the public mind for more than 40 years.
The writing and preservation of history is no less replete with
paradox than history itself. James L. Swanson, author of the recent
book Manhunt, about the search for Lincoln's assassin, nicely argues
that the restored Ford's Theatre is ultimately more a monument to John
Wilkes Booth than to Abraham Lincoln. Similarly, in knocking down the
conspiracists' shantytown of constructs, Bugliosi has had to save the
village in order to destroy it, and his book, if it has the longevity
it deserves, will be a kind of eternal flame running on the very gases
it thought it had capped."
=============
[END REVIEW.]
=============
A very nice review by Mr. Mallon, IMO. The two portions I like the
best are:
1.) The information that Bugliosi reveals about there being a soda
machine (with Dr. Pepper availability) on the FIRST floor of the Book
Depository on the day of the assassination. This is something I had no
knowledge of whatsoever. I had thought that the ONLY soda machine in
the TSBD was on the second floor.
And I have no doubt that Vince has checked his facts regarding this
first-floor soda machine (and the fact that the first-floor machine--
not the one on the 2nd Floor--offered Oswald's preferred drink, Dr.
Pepper).
One of the main reasons I have no qualms about believing this
information is this motto of VB's:
"If there's one thing I take pride in, it's that I never, ever make a
charge without supporting it. You might not agree with me, but I
invariably offer an enormous amount of support for my position." --
VINCENT BUGLIOSI
2.) [Mallon On] -- "But Lord help those he {VB} finds manipulating
quotations, telling outright lies, or depending on portions of the
Warren Report when they're otherwise trashing it. Oliver Stone, always
the ne plus ultra of disingenuousness, is by Bugliosi's reckoning
guilty of a "cultural crime" committed through a thousand
manipulations, among them the use of a smoke machine to generate a
puff of rifle smoke from the Grassy Knoll that JFK presents as being
visible to people in Dealey Plaza." -- [/Mallon Off]
Hooray for Vincent T. Bugliosi here! That's just exactly the type of
Stone-bashing I was hoping for in "Reclaiming History". ....
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.conspiracy.jfk/msg/2fa93b6e293e5e96
I'm looking forward to reading the entire Stone-wrecking chapter,
which should have me smiling from ear to ear for days (or weeks).
Thank you, Mr. Mallon, for an excellent and well-written (and
objective) review of "Reclaiming History: The Assassination Of
President John F. Kennedy".
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.conspiracy.jfk/msg/0bcdfcf65f6cb26f
