Case closed again
Vincent Bugliosi is the prosecutor who put Charles Manson away for the horrifying Tate/LaBianca murder spree in August 1969. He wrote the best-selling book Helter Skelter about the case. Now he returns with Reclaiming History, a 1,621-page book (plus another thousand pages of notes on a CD-ROM), twenty years in the making, on the assassination of JFK. Bryan Burrough's funny review of the book for the New York Times finds:
[T]he darned book is pretty good. Putting aside its ridiculous length, I have to say “Reclaiming History” is in spots a delight to read. Bugliosi is refreshing because he doesn’t just pick apart the conspiracy theorists. He ridicules them, and by name, writing that “most of them are as kooky as a $3 bill.” Bugliosi calls the dean of conspiracy buffs, Mark Lane, “unprincipled” and “a fraud.” He quotes Harold Weisberg, the author of eight conspiracy-themed books, admitting that after 35 years of research, “much as it looks like Oswald was some kind of agent for somebody, I have not found a shred of evidence to support it.”Last week the Times previewed the book here in a profile of Bugliosi by Edward Wyatt. The profile indicates that Bugliosi's interest in the Kennedy assassination derives from the 1986 mock trial of Oswald in which Bugliosi served as prosecutor and Gerry Spence as defense counsel. I saw the mock trial when it was broadcast on HBO. Bugliosi utterly routed Spence, as I am sure he does the the Kennedy conspiracy crowd in his monumental new book.What Bugliosi has done is a public service; these people should be ridiculed, even shunned. It’s time we marginalized Kennedy conspiracy theorists the way we’ve marginalized smokers; next time one of your co-workers starts in about Oswald and the C.I.A., make him stand in the rain with the other outcasts. “Reclaiming History,” though, is more than a critical analysis. Bugliosi knows how to construct a narrative, and his 316-page retelling of those “four days in November,” a book in itself, is as good a second-by-second reconstruction of the assassination and its aftermath as I’ve read.
JOHN adds: For those who aren't up to 1,600 pages on the Kennedy assassination, there are at least two other books that are very good: Conspiracy of One by Jim Moore, a conspiracy buff who came to his senses, and Case Closed by Gerald Posner. The Posner book seems to draw pretty heavily on Conspiracy of One, but includes a short biography of Lee Oswald that represents a significant contribution.
