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Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by V Bugliosi (W. W. Norton & Co, July
2008)
The American comedian Bill Hicks once said: “Have you ever been to the Kennedy assassination museum?
It’s actually in the book depository and it’s great, really great; everything is set up just the way it was on
the day of the assassination. And it’s accurate too…because Oswald isn’t in it.”
Millions of people still believe that Oswald did not, could not have killed Kennedy. Who could accept believe that
a pathetic drifter and wife beater kicked out of the marines could kill arguably the most popular American president there
has ever been? And then that assassin would himself be murdered 24-hours later? There must have been a conspiracy.
Bugliosi, a famous American attorney, is perhaps better qualified than anyone else to judge. He is the author of
the magisterial Reclaiming History, a 1648-page dissection of the Kennedy assassination, the fruits of more than
20 years’ investigative work. The conclusion? Oswald did it and he did it alone.
Four Days is Bugliosi’s briefer (about 500 pages, not including references) definitive account of
what happened the day of the assassination and the three days that followed.
Four Days is quite brilliant; the eyewitness accounts of the people who saw Oswald and then the gun in the
depository window in the minutes leading up to the assassination are truly chilling - particularly the account of the man
with a clear view, who mistakenly assumed Oswald was a secret serviceman.
The sheer number of people included can make the reader’s head spin but Bugliosi has injected enough personality
into the principal players to keep confusion to a minimum.
The only problem I had with Four Days is that it is written in the present tense; writing ‘he thinks’
instead of ‘he thought’ when discussing past events does not make for a more dramatic read, just a slightly more
awkward one.
I would urge anyone interested in the Kennedy assassination to read Four Days and nothing else. Life’s
too short to consider the impossibilities put forward by conspiracists (my favourite is that a man fired a poison dart from
his umbrella into Kennedy’s neck to set him up for a head-shot fired from the grassy knoll).
This is a great book, although not an original idea. Jacqueline Kennedy asked author William Manchester to write
The Death of a President back in 1967. This is also a detailed moment-by-moment account of the assassination and
is a masterwork, albeit a flawed one, thanks to Manchester’s efforts to be kind to Mrs Kennedy.
Then came Jim Bishop’s The Day Kennedy Was Shot, another painstaking account of the assassination.
While Bugliosi’s is by far the better book, it is interesting to note that after forty-five years of conspiracist activity,
the story hasn’t changed: Oswald did it and he did it alone.
The Litvinenko File: The True Story of a Death Foretold by
Martin Sixsmith (Macmillan April 2, 2007) RRP £16.99 (£10.18 from Amazon)
"Do you really think we’d bother assassinating a nobody like Litvinenko? Someone who left
the country God knows how long ago? Who was no threat to us and didn’t have any secrets to betray? . . . He just wasn’t
important enough. He didn’t know any secrets that would be a reason for liquidating him . . . Do you think we would
have mounted such a special operation to eliminate him . . . with polonium that costs the earth? That we would have spent
so much money on him? My God, we could have used the money to increase pensions here at home. If we’d needed to eliminate
Litvinenko, we would have done it ages ago.”
This quote, taken
from a detective speaking from the Russian Prosecutor General's Office does have a ring of truth about it. It is hard
to imagine what President Vladimir Putin could have hoped to have achieved by the brazen assassination by radiation of a low-level
Russian exile and conspiracy theorist, the former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
Author Martin Sixsmith is an experienced BBC journalist, who worked in Moscow for many years and is fluent in Russian. He has managed to interview
many of the key players in his quest for the truth and has used his experience as a successful novelist to great
effect, writing a vivid descriptive account of the assassination and his investigation. But has he got close to the truth?
Sixsmith makes the logical argument that Litvinenko's dramatic assassination by polonium poisoning
in London in 2006 was a case of punishment rather than prevention. Litvinenko had already blown all the useful information
he had allegedly smuggled out of Russia when the former FSB agent fled to the UK with his wife and son in 2000. By 2006 even
his most patient friends were having difficulty taking seriously his wild conspiracy theories about Russia's President, Vladimir Putin (which included accusations
of paedophilia).
But punishment from whom and why? This book doesn't give the answer directly but Sixsmith
leaves few doubts about as to whom he believes to be the most likely candidates and explains their reasons in some detail,
while excluding some of the wilder theories surrounding the case.
One thing that doesn't quite ring true however, is that the author appears to have been a little
too accepting of the Russian officialdom's denial of any involvement. This might have something to do with the speed
with which this book has been produced, in that there simply wasn't enough time for Sixsmith to perform in-depth and lengthy investigation
into one of the world's most secretive governments.
There is one other problem with the Litvinenko File, which I hope will be corrected in later (less-rushed)
editions. This is the lack of an index, highly useful in a book dealing with a great many theories and Russian names
and I am sure many readers who have not been following the case in the press will find it hard to keep track when a player
from an earlier chapter reappears later on. An index is also indispensable
to assassinologists and researchers such as myself who would like to use the book as a reference.
Apart from this, the Litvinenko File comes across as a level-headed, if incomplete book on
a controversial assassination. One can only hope that at some point the full story of Litvinenko's fascinating career will
be told in full by one of his ex-FSB colleagues.
Devil Incarnate: A Depraved Mercenary's Lifelong Swathe
of Destruction (Paperback, Mainstream Publishing) by Wayne Thallon, RRP £9.99, £6.59
from Amazon
Some of the world’s most terrifying and prolific assassins have come from South Africa –
for example Dirk Coetzee, head of the SA police’s Z-Squad Inc, assassinated dozens of people in a desperate
effort to maintain the apartheid system.
But perhaps the most terrifying man yet to come forward is Athol Visser, aka 'Ivan the Terrible',
described as “a ruthless torture technician who has maimed and murdered his way around the globe.” The book's blurb
tells us that “he killed his first victim at 16, his last at 60, and, in between, has been a mercenary, drug smuggler,
gun runner and spy.”
South Africa has long been suspected to have had a hand in the slaying of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme who was
gunned down in a Stockholm Street in 1986. Palme was
one of the most influential supporters of the outlawed African National Congress and was
one of the ANC's most effective fundraisers while being apartheid’s most vociferous critic. Although several South African
policemen have come forward to claim that they were involved in the assassination, a lack of concrete evidence means the case
remains wide open.
Now Visser, who is dying from AIDS, has added his take on the Palme assassination to the mix and,
without wanting to give too much away, Devil Incarnate should certainly give Swedish
investigators something to think about.
Devil Incarnate is a disturbing story; it is not an easy read. It is the tale of an evil man who became a high ranking member of South Africa's foreign assassination unit, a man who killed
for pleasure. The book is certainly worth the effort, if only because it takes us inside the mind of a man whose actions were
difficult to understand and goes some way to explaining why the world contains men like Visser.
The identity of Swedish PM Olof Palme's assassin has never been revealed
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Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot, (Simon and Schuster, June 4,
2007), £20 (£9.99 from Amazon)
Brothers will be one of the most talked about books of 2007. It tells the inside story of the Kennedy administration, from
the perspective of the inner circle of men who served JFK. And it reveals Robert F. Kennedy's dramatic secret search for the
truth about his brother's assassination.
Every once in a while, you read the first paragraph of a book and you know it’s going to be a corker. This is
the case with David Talbot’s Brothers. The book begins “Like all Americans
who lived through that day, Robert F. Kennedy never forgot how he heard is brother had been shot,” and instantly we're dramatically transported into Robert F Kennedy's longest, most terrible day. FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover (who hated the Kennedys) broke the news to Bobby on November 22, 1963 – his call contained three
blunt words spoken with malice - “The president’s dead”.
Talbot, who is the founder and former editor-in chief-of Salon.com had good reason to write Brothers:
"I was a 16-year-old campaign volunteer for Robert Kennedy the night he was shot down in Los Angeles.
It struck me then that his murder, following those of his brother and Martin Luther King Jr., had irreparably wounded America. And this feeling has never left me in all the years
that have followed. For me, aggressively pursuing the hidden history of the Kennedy years was an attempt to find out where
my country had lost its way, and perhaps to restore the hope and faith that I myself had lost as a young American growing
up in the 1960s."
Much of the book’s success in accomplishing this comes from Talbot’s access to so many of those who were
in the Kennedy camp. Brothers is based on more than 150 exclusive interviews
with prominent Kennedy administration officials, close friends and family members (along with recently declassified government
documents). For many of these ageing politicians, it will be their last word on the subject.
Brothers tells of Kennedy’s beleaguered effort
to end the Cold War paradigm the ‘Us vs. Them’ attituide that still characterises American foreign policy. By
no means a Hawk, Kennedy became so estranged from his military and intelligence advisors that he was seriously worried about
a coup or assassination.
Brothers also reveals
for the first time that RFK - who never believed the Warren Report's lone gunman theory, despite public statements to the
contrary - planned to reopen the case if he had lived and been elected president in 1968.
Brothers is also full of many wonderful, amusing and touching anecdotes
– from JFK’s dalliance in drugs to his tumultuous visit to South Africa; Talbot has really gone all-out to show
us exactly what was at the heart of JFK’s ideas and while some episodes are missing (for instance the Eisenhower-backed
assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of Congo, which led to Kennedy’s first foreign policy spat
with Khrushchev is omitted) but at a mere 400-pages, this is the most complete story of the Kennedys I have ever read.
If he had made it past Dealy
Plaza, Kennedy would have told the audience waiting for him at the end
of his motorcade that working for peace was "not a sign of weakness." "The best way to show America's strength," Kennedy intended
to say, "was not by brandishing our awesome military power but by living up to our democratic ideals" and by practicing what
we preach "about equal rights and social justice." Words that millions of Americans and millions of people around the world
would like to hear from the US president
today.
A five-star read.
Killing Mr Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on
the Middle East (Hardcover, B Tauris & Co Ltd) by Nicholas Blanford, RRP £17.99, £11.87 from Amazon.
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Nicholas Blanford, author of Killing Mr Lebanon,
knows his stuff. He is The Times' correspondent in Beirut, where he has lived for over ten years. So if you
are going to read one book on modern Lebanon and the assassination of Rafik
Hariri, then this is the one.
On Valentine’s Day 2005, a massive truck-bomb explosion tore through Beirut's
plush seafront hotel district and claimed the lives of 23 people. One of them was
Rafik Hariri, the Prime Minister of Lebanon. Hariri had been on the verge of leading an electoral campaign aimed at
ending the dominance of Lebanese politics by neighbouring Syria, a goal that many Lebanese believe cost him his life (preliminary
findings of a UN investigation into the assassination have indicated the involvement of senior officials in the Syrian regime).
Killing Mr Lebanon is as gripping as a thriller, yet packed with sober insight and history. Thanks
to his eye for detail and his broad knowledge of the region combined with the ability to dig and persuade people to talk (much
of the book's material comes from interviews with seventy key players), Blanford covers a lot of detail which really helps
fill in the gaps surrounding the assassination and what triggered it.
One of the interviewees is Hariri’s son, Saad. He was running the family's business empire in Saudi Arabia when his father's murder propelled the soft-spoken
then-35-year-old second son into the unforgiving limelight of Lebanese politics. As political heir to his father, he has had
to endure a crash course in Lebanese politics while staying one step ahead of the assassins that continue to prowl this country.
Four leading politicians and journalists have been killed in the two years since his father's death, the last being Pierre
Gemayel, the industry minister, who was gunned down in his car in November 2006.
Blanford provides the definitive account of the assassination of Hariri and Lebanon's subsequent 'Cedar Revolution' - dramatic events which are essential to
understanding the Arab quest for freedom. He explains how the murder altered the course of Lebanon's
history and the balance of power in the Middle East. More than an excellent biography of Rafik Hariri, a man of oversized ambition and appetite, who
dominated Lebanese politics for a quarter century and rebuilt Beirut, Killing
Mr Lebanon is a real life thriller and a tour de force of contemporary Lebanese politics.
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