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niversity Press of Kansas Kansas Hardcover 512 pages. Hardcover with dustjacket. Brand new book. CURRENT AFFAIRS. That recent appraisal reflects a growing consensus that the
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Warren Commission largely failed in its duty to our nation. Echoing that sentiment, the Gallup organization has reported that 75 percent of Americans polled do not believe the Commission's major conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the "lone assassin." Gerald McKnight now gives profound substance to that view in the most meticulous and devastating dissection of the Commission's work to date. The Warren Commission produced 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits, more than 17, 000 pages of testimony, and a 912-page report. Surely a definitive effort. Not at all, McKnight argues. The Warren Report itself, he contends, was little more than the capstone to a deceptive and shoddily improvised exercise in public relations designed to "prove" that Oswald had acted alone. McKnight argues that the Commission's own documents and collected testimo
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Overview
That recent appraisal reflects a growing consensus that the Warren Commission largely failed in its duty to our nation. Echoing that sentiment, the Gallup organization has reported that 75 percent of Americans polled do not believe the Commission's major conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the "lone assassin." Gerald McKnight now gives profound substance to that view in the most meticulous and devastating dissection of the Commission's work to date.
The Warren Commission produced 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits, more than 17,000 pages of testimony, and a 912-page report. Surely a definitive effort. Not at all, McKnight argues. The Warren Report itself, he contends, was little more than the capstone to a deceptive and shoddily improvised exercise in public relations designed to "prove" that Oswald had acted alone.
McKnight argues that the Commission's own documents and collected testimony--as well as thousands of other items it never saw, refused to see, or actively suppressed--reveal two conspiracies: the still very murky one surrounding the assassination itself and the official one that covered it up. The cover-up actually began, he reveals, within days of Kennedy's death, when President Johnson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach all agreed that any official investigation must reach only one conclusion: Oswald was the assassin.
While McKnight does not uncover any "smoking gun" that identifies the real conspirators, he nevertheless provides the strongest case yet that the Commission was wrong--and knew it. Oswald might have knowingly or unwittingly been involved, but the Commission's own evidence proves he could not have acted alone.
Based on more than a quarter-million pages of government documents and, for the first time ever, the 50,000 file cards in the Dallas FBI's "Special Index," McKnight's book must now be the starting point for future debate on the assassination. It should also inspire readers to echo the Journal of American History's praise for his previous book: "McKnight's insistence upon remaining within the bounds of the evidence inspires confidence in his judgment."
Editorial Reviews
Publishers Weekly
This meticulous but tendentious dissection of the official JFK assassination probe commits the very sins it condemns. Historian McKnight (The Last Crusade: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI and the Poor People's Campaign) argues that the commission embraced the politically safe lone-gunman theory from the outset and therefore slanted its investigation, ignored crucial leads and discounted contradictory evidence and witnesses. Examining mountains of documents, McKnight presents a well-researched, if dense and disjointed, indictment of a biased and sloppy commission and an obstructionist FBI. He interprets the errors and irregularities as the cover-up of a conspiracy, as he revisits such conspiracist touchstones as the Zapruder film, the position of Kennedy's neck wound, the single-bullet theory and the "false Oswald" reports. Insisting on Oswald's innocence, he floats the far-fetched conjecture that "CIA hardliners" killed Kennedy and implicated Fidel Castro in the murder as a pretext for war against Cuba. By restricting his discussion largely to Warren Commission findings, McKnight sidesteps later research supporting the Oswald-acted-alone scenario, particularly Gerald Posner's 1993 study Case Closed, which answered most of his objections and remains the best account of the assassination. 21 b&w photos. Agent, Leona Schechter. (Oct. 4) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
The Warren Commission, formed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to evaluate the FBI investigation of the Kennedy assassination, failed because Johnson himself and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sabotaged it, says McKnight (history, emeritus, Hood Coll.; The Last Crusade: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People's Campaign). Its conclusion that lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy was the culmination of a report that was a "shoddily improvised political exercise in public relations." This scrupulously researched account relies heavily on declassified government documents and arrives at the startling but plausible presumption that it wasn't Oswald who murdered the president but rogue elements of the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans, who felt betrayed by Kennedy's no-invasion pledge after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Although McKnight devotes more of the book to his discussion of the assassination than to the actions of the commission and its members, he provides a chilling and convincing rebuttal to Gerald Posner's lone gunman, no conspiracy account, Case Closed. Max Holland's The Kennedy Assassination Tapes provides an informed narrative of the politics of the Warren Commission, but McKnight's is an important addition to the literature of the Kennedy assassination. Strongly recommended for larger public and academic libraries.-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.Product Details
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