Readers should note that while Not in Your Lifetime (published in 1998) was advertised as an
updated edition of Anthony Summers’ earlier work, Conspiracy (published in 1980), it is almost an entirely different
book. The original Conspiracy stands,
in this reviewer’s judgment, as the best single investigative book ever written
on the Kennedy assassination, and it is the place for anyone new to the assassination
to start.
Unfortunately, I believe Mr. Summers, in this “update,” fell
too much under the influence of Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel and Staff Director
of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
Mr Blakey became Chief Counsel only after the original
appointee, Richard Sprague, had to step down. Sprague’s leaving had to do with
his unmistakable intention to conduct a thoroughgoing investigation of the
assassination, not depending on the FBI as the Warren Commission had or on
other investigative agencies and not constrained in its comprehensiveness. The
congressional establishment was having none of that, knowing full well that a
lot of bodies lay buried, and Mr. Sprague lost his political leverage through the
retirement of his key congressional supporter.
Mr. Blakey became chief proponent of “the Mafia did it,” his
past government service having been involved a good deal in fighting crime and
racketeering. I read Mr. Blakey’s book and other related ones, and I have never
found “the Mafia thesis” convincing. Yes, some important Mafia figures were
angry with the Kennedys, but would they put their entire billion-dollar
industry at risk? I think not. Anyway, other activities towards the end of
killing Kennedy were underway, and some Mafia figures were undoubtedly aware of
them. After all, the gigantic secret anti-Cuba terror program conducted by the
CIA in the early 1960s made bin Laden’s later little mountaintop operation
resemble a boy scout outing. The CIA had thousands of Cuban refugees trained
and armed and spent millions on attempts to assassinate Castro, run guns into Cuba,
and conduct horrific acts of terror from shootings to bombings.
As with all of Anthony Summers’ investigative books, Not in Your Lifetime (1998) is well
written. And there are some interesting new tidbits added to the story, such as
the fact that Oswald, at one point during his publicity stunt over renouncing
his citizenship (something he never actually did) at the American Embassy in
Moscow, was taken behind some doors not open to the general public. But the
immense detail of Mr. Summers’ 1980 book, Conspiracy,
is gone, details looking into almost every interesting aspect of the
assassination. And the author seems to lean towards the “Mafia did it” thesis.
But, to rephrase Bertrand Russell’s famous question about
the Warren Commission’s conclusions, if the Mafia did it, why all the state secrecy?
It was then just a sensational ordinary murder, and a good excuse to crush the
Mafia, not a political crime discrediting some of the secret agencies of
government.
Blakey also thought Oswald was involved, but I have never
accepted that. Oswald – with his past connections to security services, being
trained in Russian while in the Marines, sent on not-well-understood assignments
in Japan, and ultimately carrying out a long fraudulent defection to the Soviet
Union – fell, when back in the United States, into a murky situation he did not
fully understand. He was likely working as an informant for the FBI, the agency
charged by the Kennedys with closing the refugee terror-training camps in the
American South following the settlement with Khrushchev of the Cuban Missile
Crisis.
Oswald’s Russian-defector background made him a perfect
patsy for the assassins, and his FBI status made him pursue all avenues to
information about training camps and those running them. After all, the key to the Kennedy
assassination is communism in Cuba and the paranoid, blood-soaked drive to end
it. Everything points that way, right down to Oswald’s ridiculous leafleting and
his supposed trip to Mexico City, his association with anti-Castro fanatics
like Guy Banister and David Ferrie, and his creating a phony, one-man chapter
of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
I am hoping that a new edition of this book, coming out in 2013, reflects more the original approach of Conspiracy, but I am not overly hopeful since being disappointed by Mr. Summers' book on 9/11.
