Letters to the Editor
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What happened to Crossfire?
Crossfire is one of the best book on the assassination as it assembles EVERYTHING under one umbrella. Well...I liked it. At least Case Closed isn't on your list...
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Contract On America
is the book my father handed to me and said, solemnly, this is the way it happened. He knew Meyer Lansky and had travelled at his request twice to pre-Castro Cuba. Although not mafia, my Dad grew up with these guys. Why is this book out of print? You can find it on Amazon.
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How about "Case Closed"
Intsead of all these books that seem to promulgated a conspiracy theory, how about Case Closed by Gerald Posner, which argues (convingly) that Oswalt acted alone? At least balance your list.
Marcos
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Kennedy and Deep Politics
You must start with Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter Dale Scott. Mr. Fonzi recommends it also. It does not surprise me this book is not mentioned on Salon.com
Also recommended: Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America; and Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, The Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection.
You will see a lot more of "deep politic(al)" inquiry in the near future, especially as the carefully stage-managed media-intelligence complex starts to fall apart like Bush's orwellian presentations at military bases or in front of robotic hand-picked crowds. The works of PDS and others will have a lot to do with that. The rest is up to you. Dig in, and go deep.
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The real Truth is merely out of print
There is a book out of print but still available (I just Googled it and ordered another copy), that is the only true explanation not based on theory or conjecture. The author was personally involved with any of the subjects, and personally interviewed the assassin. The title is "Appointment in Dallas" and provides a kind of central theme-connector for those familiar with the CIA / Mafia / Bush Family / Invisible Gov't., etc., understanding of our times. Hint: 'they' are finally in positions of unchecked decision-making power and have no intention of ever letting go.
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The granddaddy of them all
If for no other purpose than "historical reasons," you should list Mark Lane's "Rush To Judgment" - the first major-market book (published in late 60s/early 70s) to seriously take on the Warren Commission's version of the story.
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Step into Oswald's Mind
Take a look at Libra by novellist Don DeLillo (best known for Underworld). A fictional account of the assassination told largely from the first-person perspective of Oswald himself, it is probably the simplest means by which the lay, non-researcher may step into the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald. The writing is so good that knowing how it ends is no disappointment. Indeed, DeLillo's own research was so thorough that he was asked to be part of the PBS/Frontline documentary, Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?
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Case Closed
A perfect demolition of the conspiracy theories.
I had the pleasure of being a nuclear chemistry graduate
student and attending a seminar on neutron activation
analysis by Vince Guinn (sp), who performed the analysis
of the so called magic bullet. (He also cracked the
case of a woman poisoning her husband with arsenic
by analysis of his hair, was able to document several
instances of poisoning in the length of the hair)
Physics doesn't lie (sometimes it doesn't reveal the
truth, but it doesn't lie)
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Cased Closed indeed
Good lord, how could you not include Cased Closed? That book basically nailed the coffin shut about this whole mess.
As each year passes, we learn more and more that this whole Kennedy assasination conspiracy crap is just that. All you conspiracy buffs have is a bunch of completely circumstantial "evidence" that becomes less and less believable over time. Science has proven, beyond a doubt, that there was just one, crazy man with a $20.00 Italian bolt-action rifle on the 6th. floor of the School Book Depository that did all this. He had the training, he had the motive, and he had the means to do it.
There was another guy with a similar life story like Oswald's...his name was Mark Chapman, and he shot and killed John Lennon. And yet we don't see nearly the same amount of coverage about that assasination. Why's that? Because that murder was just as open-and-shut as this one, we just didn't to keep Oswald alive long enough to figure it out. We had to piece it together the hard way.
You know what, here's a conspiracy for you...I say Vice President Johnson did it. He couldn't stand the Kennedys, so he made sure someone popped him so that he could take over and finish his Great Society since he knew Kennedy couldn't accomplish anything on his own. Yep, makes about as much sense as the rest of these theories about the mafia, CIA, Castro, Russkies, anti-Castro Cubans, Illuminati, alien-beings, etc.
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Top Five books? Really?
Only in a conspiracy fantasy world are these the five top books on the Kennedy assassination. Why leave off the excellent books by Gerald Posner or Jim Moore? Why not be honest enough to say 'look, I've got an agenda here, I think there was a massive conspiracy to kill Kennedy and I think there was, at least, a second gunman, so these are the books that make that case most convincingly?' Why not have the intellectual and journalistic honesty to say 'here are five good conspiracy theory books, but there are also excellent books arguing for Oswald as sole assassin--they include these, by Posner and by Moore etc. Read them and make up your own mind.
I've probably read thirty books on this subject, and find nearly all of them fail, as Talbot puts it, 'the logic test.' Any conspiracy to kill the President of the United States must have been immense, and huge conspiracies unravel. What seems clear is that there WAS a conspiracy after the fact. I think Bobby Kennedy was desperate to prevent the American people from learning just how ill his brother was, and so threw up some smoke screens regarding the autopsy. I think LBJ was just as concerned that the genuine Oswald/Cuba connections be covered up--in that atmosphere, there could well have been public pressure to punish Cuba, quite possibly leading to a US/Soviet confrontation scenario. Those conspiracies DID come unraveled--we now know that John Kennedy suffered from Addison's disease (then called Bright's disease). The truth did eventually come out. We also know that Oswald's trip to Mexico had some significance--he was likely trying to get Cuban sanction for the assassination. So, yes, there were a couple of major conspiracies regarding the Kennedy assassination, and yes, we know more today than folks did forty years ago. And surely the Warren Report had some flaws. As for these five books Talbot recommends so strongly? Read 'em--found 'em unconvincing. Sorry.