At long last, Vincent Bugliosi's book, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is coming out tomorrow. It's 1,612 pages explaining — and in Bugliosi's mind, proving conclusively — that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin in Dallas on 11/22/63. Bugliosi is an egomaniac and a man with odd ideas about the role of women in society…but regarding matters of law and crime, I have never known him to be anything but dead-on correct.
Once upon a time, I did not feel as he does about the Kennedy Assassination. I tumbled — a bit too deeply, I later realized — into the world of the Conspiracy Buffs for whom all possibilities are credible except the official one. I even met people who had ten or more mutually exclusive theories of how J.F.K. was killed and who somehow wanted to believe them all. Eventually, I came around to the view that while there were a few anomalies and suspicious things about the "Lone Nut" hypothesis, any other explanation involved fifty times as many. (I also came to the view that it was an act of masochism to try and discuss this with some people. So don't bother sending me your Grassy Knoll musings. I shan't be discussing the assassination on this page or in e-mail.)
I met Bugliosi a few years ago, back when he was originally working on this book, which he stopped and started. The man's a great talker and as others have suggested, if he'd prosecuted O.J. Simpson, that first trial would probably have had a somewhat different outcome. I look forward to the book (which you can order here, by the way) but I think what I really look forward is to the book tour, with him defending his conclusions. If you hear he's going to be on any particular talk or news show, let me know.
In the meantime, in this article, the man lays out some of his thoughts. Over on the book's website, you can download two chapters in PDF form — the Introduction and this chapter about the conspiracy theorists. Lastly, our video link today is a half-hour monologue by Mr. Bugliosi explaining what he believes and how his book proves it. You may or may not want to wade into all this and I could certainly understand if you didn't. But it's there for those of us who are interested…
