Whenever I've had time to read in the last week or so, I've been back in the past with two new books: The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews by James Reston Jr. and Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi. The first is Reston's account of the famed 1977 Frost/Nixon debates which are now the subject of a hit play. He was a key member of Frost's research/support team. The second is a major work by the famed Prosecuting Attorney, making the case that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy and that there was no, repeat, no conspiracy.
The Reston book covers much of the same ground as Frost's (obviously ghost-written) 1978 book, I Gave Them A Sword: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews. The main bit of "new" info is Reston explaining in some detail how he located a previously-overlooked and highly-damning conversation in a transcript of Nixon's infamous tapes. That bit of surprise evidence in the interviews helped Frost "nail" Nixon…or at least to keep him on the ropes for much of the Watergate conversation. Another interesting revelation is that Nixon's deal with Frost specified that during the taping, the ex-president could mop sweat from his face any time Frost was asking a question, and that footage of him doing this would not be included in the broadcast. All in all though, the book didn't tell me much that I didn't already know.
The main problem with the Bugliosi book is that it's unreadable. I don't mean it's badly-written. I mean it's unreadable. The book is over 1600 pages…and it's actually even longer than that suggests because it comes with a CD that includes all the endnotes and sources, plus the book is set in a rather small, uncomfortable font. I have terrific vision and I found my eyes glazing over every 10-12 pages. This is a shame because it's an important, exhaustive book…I think. I'm basing that on as much of it as I've been able to read so far.
I am of the mind that Oswald did act alone, that the single-bullet theory is solid, that Jack Ruby was exactly what Jack Ruby seemed to be, that there was no squadron of Cuban marksmen on the grassy knoll, etc. Once upon a time, I did not believe this and thought other, craftier forces had done the deed. I read many a work that claimed this or that, and even attended a small convention of the kind of folks who write such books. Continued exposure to the "buffs," as many call themselves, drove me back towards the official answer, not because it was official but because it was the only one that made any sense at all to me. The more I've read about it, the more convinced I've become.
Bugliosi spends much of his book demolishing some of those alternate theories. I met Bugliosi a few years back and we talked about the fact that there are 8,000 versions out there of who killed JFK and how…but none of them involve two or three people. You have the scenario that it was just Oswald and then all the rest involve hundreds of co-conspirators, all of whom have done a great job keeping mum about some pretty incredible things they did, like stealing Kennedy's body for surgical alteration before the autopsy or — and this may be my favorite — bringing in and then artfully removing phony trees that were placed on the grassy knoll to hide additional shooters. Without anyone noticing.
You may not want to tackle this book and I couldn't blame you if you didn't. Between the thick spine and the thin type, it can be rough going though I intend to keep trying in spurts. This also means wading through a frequent feature of any Vince Bugliosi book, which is the frequent reference to what a great prosecutor and investigator Vince Bugliosi is. The man's very smart and I agree with just about all his conclusions in as much of his book as I've been able to manage to date. I just wish he'd tone down the self-approbation, if only because without it, he might have gotten the thing down to a trim 1200 or so pages. Just for comparison, my copy of The Warren Commission Report is a little under 900 with a much larger and more legible typeface.