Yes, that is what the author deserves. This book is not for the casual reader (see "Four Days in November" by the same author or the "Warren Report" for a much shorter read on the assassination). Mr. Bugliosi (VB for the rest of this review) certainly did not write "Reclaiming History" for the money, since in the 20 years he took to research and write it, he could have crafted 5 shorter best sellers. Much of the length of the book is due to the author's tenacity at addressing (undressing?) the myriad of conspiracy theories, which is rather generous given how many there are and how absurd the majority of them are. In fact, as VB shows over and over again, one theory at a time, upon closer inspection, none of the conspiracy theories make any sense. His thorough rehash of the evidence, 90% of which the Warren Commission had and thoroughly hashed in 1964, and his employment of extremely hard work and plain old common sense reaffirm, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that as incompetent and slick as our political leaders can be at times, they obviously were not in a lunatical, impossible conspiracy to kill the President.
Yes the majority of Americans believe there was a conspiracy. I asked four successful, bright friends and all four believe so. One wondered if it was a jealous husband of one of JFK's conquests, another mentioned the rumor of a boat traveling to Cuba to kill Castro on the fateful day, a third opined that LBJ was behind it to protect his (supposed) family's Vietnam war profiteering. However, none of my friends has read a book on the subject... nothing wrong with that; it is not a priority to them. My point here is that at 10,000 feet it does seem very fishy that Oswald was a communist who lived in the Soviet Union and that he was killed while in the custody of the authorities assigned to protect him. My further point is that when a person with an open mind looks closely at the pile of evidence (and the absence of evidence pointing elsewhere, despite the Warren Commission and FBI conducting 25,000 interviews), there is only one conclusion.... an affirmation of the Warren Report.
For those of you who are new to the JFK assassination topic (you are probably in the small minority of readers/responders out here), you will notice that the reviews of Reclaiming History and just about every other book on this topic are very polarized.... lots of 5 stars and lots of 1 stars. Similarly, if you write a book review you are likely to receive some thumbs up and also some emotional, indignant disagreement. You know where I stand. The conspiracy theorists fascinate me; in the face of irrefutable evidence they shut their eyes and ears and instead look all the harder for some minor contradiction, police error or oversight, or some person who claims to have been in Dealy Plaza during the assassination and now has re-remembered what they saw or heard..... of course for a speaker fee, a book deal, or some other goodies. The buffs often consider any one such human imperfection or coincidence as "evidence of a conspiracy" and often new conspiracy books take root from such inconsequential seed. Some people, reminiscent of the comically defiant knight with severed arms and legs in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", are waiting for the year 2025 for the government to release whatever crumbs of materials are not already available, fantasizing that they will solve the case with them.
I got interested in the JFK assassination topic about twenty years ago. As I wrote above, the case seemed fishy; so being a true crime book fan I started reading about the crime of the century. I read several conspiracy theory books and three things struck me about them. First, they seemed to be stretching believability by often having an entire theory/book based on one or two flimsy ideas. One book actually theorized that the fatal head shot was fired accidentally by a secret service agent in a following car. Second, none of the eight or so conspiracy books I read had any reasonable explanation for the mountain of evidence against Oswald, and only against Oswald.... they had their "new information" and "what ifs" and "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" wherein Oswald could be connected to Ruby and they both were connected to everyone on the planet.... but they had no EVIDENCE that I could see. The third thing that struck me was that in their supposed search for the truth, the conspiracy theories rarely reconcile with or challenge other, contradictory and competing theories. And I mean "competing" since, unfortunately, JFKs death has been commercialized into a cottage industry that has dozens of books written each year and has conventions charging admission.
p.s. I got a good laugh about the conspiracy theory that Oswald was replaced by an impersonator KGB agent who came back from Russia and did the killing. As VB points out, this author/theorist never explains how Oswald's own mother and brother could possibly not know this was not Lee. The icing on the cake is that Oswald's arrest fingerprints on November 22 matched those from his U.S. Marine files from the late 1950's (before he went to Russia). The conspiracy author's sub-theory on that one is that the KGB could have swapped out the Marine Department's personnel files with faked ones. How do people write or believe this stuff with a straight face? We might as well believe that Martians from Area 51 flew in to assist. Sadly, one of these cretons convinced Marina Oswald to have her husband's body exhumed in hopes of proving the remains were not her husband's... they were.
So I then read the much maligned Warren Report. For those of you new to it, LBJ appointed Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to chair a group of 7 top leaders from both parties, to lead a massive effort, with unlimited access and unlimited budget, to find out the truth and publish it. The full report was 19 volumes, I believe, but one summarized volume was also published since the government wanted citizens to read it. I read the one volume and found it to be surprisingly easy to understand, unbiased, and thorough. It was in this reading that it became very clear that there was no "magic bullet", that Oswald was an unstable, hateful loner, that Jack Ruby was also unhinged but well-meaning, that coincidences and nobodys can drive history (recall how World War One got ignited), and most importantly, a confirmation that our leaders on the Warren Commission, for example Gerald Ford, were (as common sense would dictate) as interested in the truth and as patriotic as the populace they had the Warren Report created for. The Warren Report was the first honest book I read on this topic... I wish it had been THE first book I read on this topic.
"Reclaiming History" has a lengthy chapter laying bare the pack of lies in Oliver Stone's "JFK" movie. It is unfortunate but not surprising that many people, particularly the younger generations, get their view of history from such tripe. Oliver certainly covered his conspiracy bases... fingering the 200% innocent Clay Shaw, the Soviet Union, the Mafia, CIA, FBI, LBJ... everybody except Lee Harvey Oswald, Jackie Kennedy, and the White House elevator operator were in on Stone's snake oil conspiracy. If you want another opinion about how Stone treats the truth, google Ray Manzarek's opinion of "The Doors" movie. I recently spotted a new conspiracy book on a rack and saw that the forward was by Oliver Stone... as I said before, the conspiracy cottage industry is loyal to one another despite, or perhaps because of, their differences. The common bonds the industry members have are their zany theories propped up by unreliable sources, lies, and speculation, and their total absence of hard EVIDENCE (like bullets, shell casings, or money funneled to Oswald or Ruby that they obviously should have had if they were hired assassins). In fifty years the conspiracy industry has produced no hard evidence pointing to Oswald's innocence or to the involvement of the Cubans, the Mafia, defense industry, LBJ, KGB, the CIA, the FBI, the NFL, the NBA, B.B. King, or triple A. If they were serious about finding the truth one would hope that, in 50 years, they would have at least narrowed the field of theories, but they and Stone are more interested in more ways to sell books and movie tickets. There is endless room to roam, with no sanity checks, in the conspiracy tent.
After reading VB's book of over 1,500 pages, I could write a small book in review, and sensing I am well on that path I will try to get towards a conclusion. I will try to summarize the pure logic and intuitive truth of Reclaiming History (and the Warren Report) by focusing on one key point VB makes very early in the book as an example (I believe in the introduction).... the necessity for not just one but TWO conspiracies.
As VB made clear, for there to be a conspiracy, there had to be TWO: One conspiracy to hire assassin/s who killed JFK, and then a SECOND conspiracy to cover it up. Let's put aside the extremely far fetched theories such as a crime boss or a foreign leader convincing the entire Warren Commission and the hundreds of investigators to cover up their assassination of our heroic president (JFK courageously lied to military doctors to cover up his poor health so he could get INTO the fighting in WW II). Let's take one of the most popular theories (the others are even less likely), the one that says LBJ was behind it. Now, to make this easier to relate to, let's replace the names back then with current leaders and see how this theory sounds. If you think the following is remotely plausible you should never handle money.
First my disclaimer... I love my country and think even the remote idea of threatening any public official, let alone our President, is treason. Now, here is the pretend theory to illustrate how ridiculous one of the main theories (again, the others are even more ridiculous) is. Our current Vice President Joe Biden wants to be president. He senses that the President has made a deal with the Clintons' to support Hillary in 2016 (so far we are still on planet earth... very plausible). Now we blast off into the conspiracy outer space.
The VP reaches out to some group/s to eliminate the President so the VP will then ascend to the presidency. The VP must have some very evil yet very, very loyal friends since if just one of them turned the rest in they would be executed for high treason. These conspirator friends are however dumb enough to bet their lives on an unstable wife beater (aka Oswald) who hates authority and hates taking orders from anyone, and owns an inexpensive mail order rifle. Yes, Oswald was a documented Marine marksman, very capable of hitting the slow moving presidential car (note... one of the out right lies by Oliver Stone was that Oswald was not a good shot) but he was a loose cannon with mental issues... the last type of person to hire for this job. Without paying him a cent, they convince this all time loser and loner to say he is bringing curtain rods to work, when in reality he is bringing his rifle. He fires the fatal shots (unless one believes the further nonsense of assassins firing from the sewer or behind the grassy knoll fence (which, by the way is the parking lot for the Dallas Sheriff's office.... must be real smart assassins. Further by the way, there was no damage to the entire left side of JFK's skull or brain, which is further evidence that no shots hit the President from the right/front (none even hit the entire limousine)... any such shot would have caused a small entry wound on the right and blown through to do massive damage to the left side and cratered out his skull there.. Oswald's fatal shot created a small bullet entrance hole in the back of the skull and blew out the right/top of the skull as JFK was leaning down to the left towards Jackie).
The shooter, who can turn in the entire gang if caught, then flees the building. Instead of picking him up in a waiting car and silencing him forever, the assassination team lets the shooter take a bus (Oswald was a penny pincher who had $13 on him when arrested), then a short cab ride (bus got stuck in traffic) back to his squalid, tiny apartment. They leave the shooter free to grab his revolver (yes, he purchased two guns months before, and that is months before anyone knew JFK was visiting Dallas, let alone driving past the Book Depository Building... in fact Oswald tried assassinating a right wing activist in Dallas months before, and in that crazed effort he acted as independently as he did months later on November 22), leave his apartment, be spotted by several people killing a cop who stops him, and get arrested so he can then be interrogated for two days.
Then this cracker jack conspiracy team hires a strip club owner with a penchant for hanging around police headquarters, who shows up an hour AFTER the announced (on TV and radio) scheduled time that Oswald was to be moved from the police HQ building. However, Oswald's transfer was delayed an hour by further interrogation by the police and an IRS specialist (the Feds were quickly working with Dallas Police on exploring avenues of possible conspiracy, and the IRS was involved to exhaustively track every penny Oswald earned and spent... his total worth was $213), and thus Ruby coincidentally walked in just in time to exercise his misguided patriotism. You get the timing here.... the Dallas Police Department team and the IRS had to also be in on the conspiracy since they must have waited for the strip club owner to show up to kill Oswald.
Furthermore, Ruby loved being around the Police and giving them free coffee and sandwiches (not a bad idea since he owned a strip club (often frequented by police) and always carried a gun since he had to carry wads of cash from the club every night). Buffs pointing to the fact that bad guys went to Ruby's strip club is comically reminiscent of the movie "Casablanca" when Captain Renault (Claude Rains) says he is "shocked" that there is gambling at Rick's. Now if the singing nun and the flying nun were hanging out with Ruby at his strip club I would agree that something was very suspicious.
Recall that Ruby was also at Dallas Police HQ the day before (Nov. 22, the day of the murders of JFK and Officer Tippit). Jack was known as a good hearted, a bit nutty, chatterbox who if told a secret could not keep it by the time he walked across the street. He was obsessively distraught at JFK's murder and was also reveling in the excitment, handing out coffee and donuts, and at one point was 5 feet from Oswald in a hallway. Yet Ruby did not put a bullet in Oswald's head then; he stumbles in the next day, an hour late and shoots Oswald in the stomach. The stomach shot is something you NEVER read about in Mafia or CIA / James Bond style hits due to the high likelyhood the victim will survive (Oswald had several organs damaged and lost too much blood to survive the complicated surgeries required to repair them), just as the Mafia avoids rubbing out high level U.S. Government officials, let alone a U.S. President (recall that Lucky Luciano and his committee wisely had Dutch Schultz bumped off since Schultz wanted to kill Thomas Dewey, who was only a Manhattan Special Prosecutor). VB uses the term "the surface of the sun" to describe the heat and wrath that would have befallen organized crime if they had been responsible. But back to the fictitious VP conspiracy example... the conspiracy team also never realizes that they have replaced one problem with another, since the new shooter is now in custody (and the president's shooter was already in custody for 2 days of interrogation). As VB repeatedly shows in his huge book, one can go on and on making points to show how nonsensical this or any other of the conspiracy theories are.
Anyway... ever onward we go to the required second conspiracy. So now our Vice President must appear to be interested in finding the truth, but secretly controlling the cover up. So the fictitious equivalent to Joe Biden creates a commission headed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts. Biden then convinces six of the most respected, top leaders of both parties to join the Roberts Commission. Let's say for example Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, John McCain, Harry Reid, Mitt Romney, and one other person. Now we all know this group can barely agree on yesterday's weather, however, Biden then either individually or collectively coerces all seven of them that they should, for reasons unknown (use your imagination.... I'm out of ideas here) cover up the murder of our beloved President. AND THEY ALL AGREE. AND ALL THEIR STAFFS AND INVESTIGATORS AGREE. THEY ALL AGREE TO COMMIT HIGH TREASON by becoming accomplices after the fact to the murder of the President, knowing that if anyone goes to the authorities, their lives are over and their families' legacies will be worse than Benedict Arnold's. NOT ONE of these dozens or hundreds of people does what EVERYONE would do.... immediately turn in the fictitious Biden and his despicable conspirators.
Furthermore, the FBI, which provides most of the massive manpower for the investigation, reports to Attorney General Holder, who is like a brother to the President (JFK's Attorney General was Robert Kennedy). Every one of the FBI, Dallas Police, CIA, and Roberts Commission investigators know that if they uncover a conspiracy they will be more famous than Elliot Ness and Woodward and Bernstein rolled into one.... but in the magical conspiracy land they are all either in on it (again... unanimously) or unanimously subdued sheep. Fifty years and 500 conspiracy books pass and from this supposed army of required conspirators, there is not one plea bargain struck, not one death bed confession, and not one shred of hard evidence of a conspiracy.
The above is one, long example of how ludicrous the conspiracy theories are if you fairly analyze any one of them. The conspiracists avoid or try to distort the rock solid evidence against Oswald and only Oswald and don't challenge each other.... they know they have to hit and run and throw up smoke screens.... they can't afford to stand still since their theories don't stand up to the evidence or to common sense. By the way, the above example is more reasonable (if that is possible) than others like the Mafia or Cubans (as a head of the CIA once said, if we found out the Castro was involved, we would have bombed Cuba back to the Middle Ages. Fidel Castro is a very smart man and a survivor; he knew that). If the VP convincing the group of people above to cover up the murder of the President sounds like fantasy, imagine someone from the Mafia trying to. We can all agree that the "Godfather" was a great film, albeit romanticized. But the idea that the Kennedy Family (who did their own investigation (again common sense)), and the leaders of what some call our "greatest generation" and their army of law enforcement investigators, would be intimidated by a mafia leader who killed the most beloved man on the planet, is beyond fantasy... it is despicable.
And that last word frankly describes many of the conspiracy writers, who continue to distort the historical record to continue their sleazy careers, who say they believe the words of the murderer of our president that he was an "innocent patsy" yet disbelieve ALL of the Dallas police, FBI, Warren Commission and staffs, who view New Orleans DA Jim Garrison as their messiah when in truth he was a low life who destroyed an innocent war hero (Clay Shaw), who write books about "hit lists" of supposedly suspicious deaths yet none of the hundreds of conspiracy writers themselves are on them (one such list had LBJ and Earl Warren on it... and they died of heart attacks in the 1970's). These "authors" peddle malicious lies about people who are not alive to defend themselves (and found it beneath their dignity to defend themselves when alive), people who were tremendously successful, intelligent, and yes patriotic leaders who thrived in the hardball league of national politics. The truth is that most of these conspiracy "authors" would not have been worthy of shining the shoes of people like LBJ, Earl Warren, Gerald Ford, Dulles, RFK, Nicholas Katzenbach, Clay Shaw, or Officer Tippit, the oft forgotten Dallas policeman who was also murdered that day by the weasel Oswald. VB's book is as, or more, indignant about the conspiracy industry as I am. Some readers find his indignancy as mean spirited or too sarcastic. However, I see his book as a tremendous work of patriotism, a long-needed chastisement to the leeches and, yes, a reclaimation of our history.
So what happens next... conspiracy clingers may come out blasting and attack my review (which is fair since I attacked their thinking). You may read Reclaiming History; it is very long but the introduction alone is utterly convincing. If you read this aptly named book with an open mind I believe you will see things as I do.... our government did not deceive us (golly, don't we need to be happy and hopeful when that happens) and there will always be people who are so jaded, suspicious, or paranoid or have some other malady beyond my imagination, that they cling to their conspiracy theories as if they were their life blood or the air they breathe.
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Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
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Top reviews from other countries
Darren Bonaparte
Essential reading on this tragic event.
Reviewed in Canada on October 17, 2023
Justinian
The truth is stranger than fiction
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 9, 2009
Patrick Collins
Outstanding, authoritative and delivers a huge blow to the "jfk assassination industry"
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 29, 2007