What a pleasure to discover a book of this quality near the
fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. As someone with an enduring
interest in the subject who has read a variety of books, I assure readers that
here is one of the best and most informative books written on the subject since
Anthony Summers’ original Conspiracy of
1980.
Alex Cox has not done the same kind of original
investigation that Anthony Summers did (indeed, it is too late in time even to
attempt that again), but his approach is that of extracting and assembling the
key findings of other studies and investigations, and it is a valuable approach
when done well, as it very much is here. The timeline method of highlighting two
parallel lives yields some eyebrow-raising coincidences and discoveries not
commonly found with other approaches.
Perspective, and not mere recitation of facts like data
points on a scatter graph, is an important element to understanding historical
events, and a powerful perspective is what this book offers, perhaps more so
than any other.
Mr. Cox gives us a fact-packed and well-written narrative, and
he doesn’t waste a sentence telling his story. You will be riveted by the text.
Importantly, here Oswald is not regarded as a villain and Kennedy not
over-rated as a saint. Indeed, it is a major flaw in perhaps the majority of
books on the subject to assume the opposite of one of these characterizations.
Despite the graceful and polished public image, the Kennedys
were often unattractive people who made many enemies as their driving ambitions
scraped against or crushed the interests of others, although one believes by
the time he was killed, the President had learned some hard and valuable
lessons about governing and was on his way to some worthy achievement.
Oswald was, as goes the typical recitation of his background,
a poor young man with little formal education and a chaotic upbringing, but he
was also a young man with talent and decent motives (and, indeed, a man
possessing the rather typical American patriotic views of his time) seeking an
interesting and unconventional life of service when he got sucked up into
powerful, murderous events he never fully understood.
The insights offered in this book include not just facts and
issues around the assassination but a deadly accurate (I did live through these
years) sense of the poisonous and complex political atmosphere in the United
States during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
