Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

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Bugliosi, a former prosecutor, recounts JFK case from a forensic and theoretical point of view. His self-proclaimed mission is to discredit unsupported conspiracy theories. This is a worthy mission. There are a lot of stupid JFK conspiracy theories out there. But the result is a flabby book that devotes most of its energy to describing what did NOT happen in Dallas on November 22, 1963, as opposed to explaining what actually did happen. Garrison gives you all of the clues that he uncovered during his investigation, which led him to believe that Oswald is not the real killer and that bigger players were involved. This book inspired Oliver Stone’s movie titled JFK, which features Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison. Just like the book, the movie was also a huge box office success.

Dr. Moore has received overwhelming praise for his work on this book, and if you are interested in the topic of President Kennedy’s death, then this book is as good of a read as all of the other ones on this list. Talbot articulates a consensus belief of the electorate (not just academicians) when he writes, “ A growing historical consensus now sees JFK as presiding over a bitterly divided government, with Kennedy and his peace-minded inner circle on one side and a war-hungry Cold War establishment on the other. Even humdrum Kennedy historian Robert Dallek has now signed on to this view, with a new book that argues JFK’s biggest enemies were not Communist leaders but his own generals and espionage chiefs. This is a sobering conclusion, of course, because it provides a possible explanation for the bloody regime change in Dallas.”During the thirteen days in October 1962 when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In this unique account, he describes each of the participants during the sometimes hour-to-hour negotiations, with particular attention to the actions and views of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. The virtues of Summers’s historical journalism is evident when you compare his approach to Bugliosi and Waldron’s. In The Revolution of Robert Kennedy, journalist John R. Bohrer focuses in intimate and revealing detail on Bobby Kennedy’s life during the three years following JFK’s assassination. Torn between mourning the past and plotting his future, Bobby was placed in a sudden competition with his political enemy, Lyndon Johnson, for control of the Democratic Party. The reason for that is because while this book goes in-depth on some aspects of the conspiracy, other important aspects that are important for getting the full picture are left out. But the most interesting of all the literary retorts to the Warren report is Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995), which used KGB material released in post-Soviet Russia to illuminate the formative period that Kennedy’s presumed assassin spent in the USSR as a young man. However, despite this period deepening the mystery of Oswald’s motives, the generally anarchistic Mailer eventually concludes: “Every insight we have gained of him suggests the solitary nature of his act.” Mailer’s sly comparison of the assassination with masturbation underlines his theory that the killer was driven by narcissistic egotism, rather than an external commission.

Throughout the 1960s, Robert F. Kennedy kept a private journal of favorite quotations, recording the philosophies of great leaders and thinkers throughout history. Thirty years after his father’s tragic death, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy has culled the highlights of this journal, along with moving portions of Robert Kennedy’s most memorable speeches, to create an inspiring, immortal voice for his father’s vision. With new research, interviews, and an intimate sense of Kennedy, Thurston Clarke provides an absorbing historical narrative that goes right to the heart of America’s deepest despairs – and most fiercely held dreams – and tells us more than we had understood before about this complicated man and the heightened personal, racial, political, and national dramas of his times. Make Gentle the Life of this World; Edited by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy In this profound installment to the ever-growing index of books on Robert Kennedy, Ellen B. Meacham tells the story of his visit to the Delta, while also examining the forces of history, economics, and politics that shaped the lives of the children he met in Mississippi in 1967 and the decades that followed.As evidence shows, John F. Kennedy was shot from a nearby building by a man known as Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine. JFK Short Bio Published in 2013, shortly before the 50 th anniversary of the tragic event, Killing JFK is a fairly new book on Kennedy’s assassination. Lance Moore, an acclaimed author, puts together all of the facts in a conceivable and easy-to-read manner, and lists over 200 credible sources that JFK’s killing was in fact more than the act of a single actor. The reason why Lane claims that the CIA eliminated JFK is that he had plans of dissolving the agency. He also goes in on the media, blaming them for not covering the conviction trials of the alleged murderer closely, and for failing to give any sort of credibility to potentially promising conspiracy theories.

Among the strip mines, one-room schoolhouses, and dilapidated homes, however, Kennedy encountered a strong mistrust and intense resentment of establishment politicians. Most publications have been sceptical of this finding. On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison (1988), a Louisiana lawyer, and L Fletcher Prouty’s JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F Kennedy (1992), featured key source material for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK(1991), which suggested that the president was executed by a vast cabal of businessmen, gangsters, politicians, soldiers, Cuban dissidents and spooks.

I would give Summers top marks, however, for writing a top-shelf book from the other side of the aisle. While I generally did not agree with many of his conclusions in the 1998 edition, I did at least find the book far less ludicrous than some other works out there. Douglass’s “JFK and the Unspeakable” is better than “Reclaiming History” and “Legacy of the Secrecy” in this regard, but I think it still suffers from the fact that Douglass is a liberation theologian, not a journalist. His concern is ultimately spiritual. Since my spirit is like-minded, I don’t hesitate to recommend Douglass’s book to newcomers to the JFK story. But I have to admit that Douglass’s work is sometimes permissive in its standards of evidence. It does not have the rigor of “Not in Your Lifetime.” Speculation about Oswald’s activities on his Mexico trip have long fueled one of the most popular JFK-related conspiracy theories, which argues that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro plotted to assassinate Kennedy as revenge for the Bay of Pigs invasion. In the 1970s, revelations that the Kennedy administration made various attempts to assassinate Castro fueled the idea that Castro acted first against Kennedy. Are persons who would think up Operation Northwoods not capable of planning to kill a President too?