If you try carrying this to the beach, you'll get a hernia

It's more than 1500 pages and includes a CD-Rom, so it's exhaustive. And the illustrations, while not at all sensational, are still grisly, so it's not fun. But damn if Vince Bugliosi hasn't put an end to all the back-and-forth: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.*

Usually when the Kennedy Assassination is discussed, I agree with whoever spoke last or loudest. "Yeah, that makes sense" quickly becomes, "That makes even more sense! Why didn't I think of that before?" But Bugliosi -- fabulous litigator that he is -- debunks every aspect of every conspiracy theory you've ever heard.

I haven't finished this yet (1500 pages!), but from what I've read the strength is that he treats this as a murder. A crime. Not one of the tragedies of the 20th century, but a homicide. Strip away the romance of Camelot and it's easy to see this as the tawdry, poorly planned crime it was. For example, Oswald didn't have to be a great shot. After the first shot, the non-fatal one that pierced the President's neck, his target didn't really move. Most victims would have fallen onto the seat and out of view with that first shot. But JFK wore a crude but tragically effective back brace that prevented him from much motion, giving Oswald a clean target and enough time to actually commit murder.

Peter Jennings once said that JFK assassination theories flourish because the crime and the criminal aren't equals, and we want it to be about more somehow, to even the scales and give the horror greater meaning. How could a loner with marital and financial problems and an itching to be famous manage to martyr our President on a bright, sunny Dallas afternoon? It doesn't make sense. As Jennings pointed out, Hitler was a brilliant, powerful monster the likes of which the world had never seen before, so emotionally it's understandable that he was able to exterminate millions of blameless citizens. Oswald was an aimless failure. It's harder to accept him as Assassin. So we invent alternative theories with "bigger" villains, like the Mob or the CIA or Castro.

But it is what it is. Just a gunshot homicide. Bugliosi goes after the truth the way a smart prosecutor/investigator does. John F. Kennedy was, by all serious accounts, a realist. I believe he would have appreciated this detailed but emotionally unvarnished view of his demise. Thanks to Bugliosi, we get to "reclaim history," which is not unimportant at all. (It's just not a "lightweight" summer read, not in any sense of the word!)





*Thereby vindicating Crash Davis (Kevin Costner in Bull Durham). That speech that begins with, "I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone," still takes my breath away, even after 20 years.