On This Day In History President John F. Kennedy Was Assassinated

As History.com notes, on this day in 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

You can read about the assassination via the below link:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/john-f-kennedy-assassinated?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2017-1122-11222017&om_rid=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa&om_mid=272545525&kx_EmailCampaignID=15805&kx_EmailCampaignName=email-hist-tdih-2017-1122-11222017&kx_EmailRecipientID=de5e4076c942a595dbda53f758321d197499484f6d117f61b6ac5c08e0d6f0aa

Case Closed: The Book That Cured Me Of JFK Conspiracies Once And For All

Hector Tobar at the Los Angeles Times tells readers that his reading of Gerald Posner's Case Closed cured him of Kennedy assassination conspiracies.

For a few years after seeing Oliver Stone’s 1991 political thriller "JFK," I was an assassination buff. I bought one of the books on which the film was based: “On the Trail of the Assassins” by Jim Garrison. I reread “Libra,” Don DeLillo’s masterful 1988 novel, in which Lee Harvey Oswald, assorted New Orleans spies and underworld figures conspire to kill the president. The assassination is the greatest mystery of our times, and in those books I found clues that left me feeling tantalizingly close to solving it.

But 20 years ago I was cured of my conspiracy-theory fever forever. A single book was the antidote.
Gerald Posner’s “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK” was published in 1993, on the 30th anniversary of the assassination. As the title suggests, its chief protagonist is Oswald, a man with the kind of lonely, tortured and eventful biography that American culture has produced pretty routinely in the decades since. In fact, I would argue that there are echoes of Oswald’s life in figures as diverse as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the two teenage boys who massacred their classmates at Columbine High School in Colorado.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-book-jfk-conspiracies-cure-20131120,0,928971.story#axzz2ladTgHPE

Note: Like most of the military, intel and security people I worked with and knew during my years in the Navy and as a Defense Department civilian employee, I suspected that Fidel Castro killed President Kennedy. President Johnson also suspected Castro. But, like Hector Tobar, I too was cured of that suspicion by reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed. 

The Kennedy Conspiracy In Plain Sight

Rich Lowry at National Reviews offers a column on the Kennedy assassination.

For all these years, they’ve hidden the truth about the Kennedy assassination.

It didn’t require a conspiracy. It just took repeating a falsehood until it became conventional wisdom. The myth about the Kennedy assassination is that President John F. Kennedy, at great personal risk, traveled to Dallas, aka the City of Hate, and was somehow murdered by an atmosphere of intolerance. The truth is that he was shot by a Communist. 

... In a news report, Timesman Manny Fernandez writes of the “painful, embarrassing memories of the angry anti-Washington culture that flourished here 50 years ago — and now seems a permanent part of the national mood.”

Get it? The rancid political culture of Dallas that was responsible for the death of Kennedy lives on today in the Tea Party, which needs to be stopped before it kills again.

There are at least two problems with all this. The first is that cities don’t kill people. Neither does political hostility. There was plenty of kookery, racism, and ugliness in Dallas circa 1963 — and much derision and abuse of Kennedy — but none of those things picked up a rifle and shot the president of the United States.

The second — and amazingly enough, saying it still carries a subversive hint of revisionism — is that Oswald was a thoroughgoing Communist.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/364562/kennedy-conspiracy-plain-sight-rich-lowry

A Look Back At The Kennedy Assassination

Today is the 50th anniversary of what must be considered the "Crime of the 20th Century," the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

I wrote about the great crime in my Crime Beat column for the Orchard Press Online Mystery Magazine in 2002.

You can read the column via the link below:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/01/crime-beat-column-assassination-of.html

My Washington Times Review Of 'The Third Bullet," Stephen Hunter's Kennedy Assassination Thriller

 

My review of  The Third Bullet, Stephen Hunter's thriller about the Kennedy assassination, appeared this morning in the Washington Times.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, was the crime of the 20th century.

Like many of the military and intelligence people I met while serving in the U.S. Navy and later as a Defense Department civilian employee, I believed Fidel Castro killed Kennedy. Kennedy attempted to kill the communist Cuban leader and the dictator announced publicly that he intended to return the favor.

My view changed after reading Gerald Posner's book “Case Closed.” Mr. Posner debunked all of the Kennedy conspiracies and laid the deed squarely on Lee Harvey Oswald. Vincent Bugliosi, the famed prosecutor of the Charles Manson “family,” further assured readers that Oswald was the lone assassin in his huge book “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

Stephen Hunter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for The Washington Post, said that he started writing his first novel, “Point of Impact,” with the Kennedy assassination in mind. When he started the book, he said, everyone thought a conspiracy was behind the killing. Halfway through the novel Mr. Hunter read “Case Closed” and he ceased believing in conspiracy. The premise of his early novel had been destroyed, and in the end, he separated the novel from the JFK assassination.

However, in “The Third Bullet,” Mr. Hunter returns to the scene of the famous crime. He sets a serious “gun guy” — the legendary former Marine sniper and Vietnam veteran Bob Lee Swagger, known as “ Bob the Nailer” — on a course to discover the truth behind the Kennedy assassination.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/8/book-review-the-third-bullet/?page=all#pagebreak