Product Description

For over forty years the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been obscured. This book releases us from a crippling distortion of American history. This extraordinary and historic book required twenty years to research and write. The oft-challenged findings of the Warren Commission—Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot and killed President John F. Kennedy—are here confirmed beyond all doubt. But Reclaiming History does much more than that. In addition to providing a powerful and unprecedented narrative of events and a biography of the assassin, it confronts and destroys every one of the conspiracy theories that have grown up since the assassination, exposing their selective use of evidence, flawed logic, and outright deceptions. So thoroughly documented, so compellingly lucid in its conclusions, Reclaiming History is, in a sense, the investigation that completes the work of the Warren Commission. In it, Vincent Bugliosi, the nation's foremost prosecutor, takes on the most important murder in American history.

At 1:00 p.m. on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead, the victim of a sniper attack during his motorcade through Dallas. That may be the only fact generally agreed upon in the vast literature spawned by the assassination. National polls reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans (75%) believe that there was a high-level conspiracy behind Lee Harvey Oswald. Many even believe that Oswald was entirely innocent. In this continuously absorbing, powerful, ground-breaking book, Vincent Bugliosi shows how we have come to believe such lies about an event that changed the course of history.

The brilliant prosecutor of Charles Manson and the man who forged an iron-clad case of circumstantial guilt around O. J. Simpson in his best-selling Outrage Bugliosi is perhaps the only man in America capable of writing the definitive book on the Kennedy assassination. This is an achievement that has for years seemed beyond reach. No one imagined that such a book would ever be written: a single volume that once and for all resolves, beyond any reasonable doubt, every lingering question as to what happened in Dallas and who was responsible.

There have been hundreds of books about the assassination, but there has never been a book that covers the entire case, including addressing each and every conspiracy theory and the facts, or alleged facts, on which they are based. In this monumental work, the author has raised scholarship on the assassination to a new and final level, one that far surpasses all other books on the subject. It adds resonance, depth, and closure to the admirable work of the Warren Commission.

Reclaiming History is a narrative compendium of fact, forensic evidence, reexamination of key witnesses, and common sense. Every detail and nuance is accounted for, every conspiracy theory revealed as a fraud on the American public. Bugliosi's irresistible logic, command of the evidence, and ability to draw startling inferences shed fresh light on this American nightmare. At last it all makes sense. 32 pages of illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37608 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-15
• Released on: 2007-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1648 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Bugliosi, best known as Charles Manson's prosecutor, spent more than 20 years writing this defense of the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the slaying of President Kennedy, but his obsession has produced a massive tome that's likely to overwhelm most readers. At times, the author seems determined to present every detail his researches revealed, even if it doesn't add to the overall picture (like a footnote on Elvis sightings). Further, while Bugliosi says even serious conspiracy theorists don't claim the FBI or Secret Service were involved, he devotes chapters to each. The book's structure—it's organized by subject, such as theories about the role of the FBI, the KGB or anti-Castro Cubans—leads to needless repetition, and, for an author who excoriates conspiracy theorists, charging them with carelessness and making wild accusations, Bugliosi is not always temperate in his language; for example, twice he makes the nonsensical claim that some Warren Commission critics "were screaming the word conspiracy before the fatal bullet had come to rest." His decision to devote twice as many pages to critiquing Oliver Stone's movie JFK as to his chapter on organized crime (identified by the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassination as the likely conspirators) is a curious one, as is the choice to open the book with a dramatic re-creation of events surrounding the assassination rather than a straightforward chronology of the relevant facts. Moreover, Bugliosi does not always probe whether individuals who are the sole source for certain facts (for example, Oswald's widow, Marina) had any motive to lie. Bugliosi's voluminous endnotes are on an accompanying CD. Gerald Posner's 1993 Case Closed made most of the same points in a much more concise way. 32 pages of illus. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
This weighty book (its pages number sixteen hundred and twelve) claims to be the final word on the assassination of President Kennedy. It is as if Bugliosi, who prosecuted the Manson murders, intended to overwhelm with sheer, footnoted bulk. But in the way that others have "proved" conspiracies, Bugliosi "proves" yet again the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald. He does this by reëxamining familiar evidence but also by dismissing preposterous theories, such as one that J. Edgar Hoover masterminded the murder to keep his job. Bugliosi steps less certainly in considering the work of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which, in 1978, concluded that J.F.K. was "probably" killed as the result of a plot. Citing a National Research Council study, Bugliosi brushes aside the committee’s acoustic evidence suggesting that four shots were fired in Dallas (a fourth shot would confirm a second gunman); he is uncomfortable with a subsequent analysis, by the British Forensic Science Society, which challenged the N.R.C. opinion. Mysteries are like that"
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From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Alan Wolfe

It is not just that the book runs to 1,612 pages; each page is wider than one finds in a normal volume, and the print on each page is smaller. And then there is the enclosed CD with all the endnotes and source material. In Reclaiming History, Vincent Bugliosi gives you everything you wanted to know about the Kennedy assassination, whether or not you were afraid to ask. Compared to it, the Warren Commission Report, which clocked in at 888 pages, is small stuff.

To say that Bugliosi wants to strike a nail in the coffin of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists is putting it mildly; he wants to drive a tractor trailer through their ranks and scatter everyone in sight. Is such an effort really necessary? I am afraid it is, which is another way of saying that we ought to be grateful for Bugliosi's obsession.

Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed John F. Kennedy. Absent a trial proving his guilt, Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter, has offered the next best thing: a prosecutor's air-tight brief that leaves no reasonable doubt. A short review cannot possibly do justice to the case he assembles, so let me just offer a taste of Bugliosi's methods. The first thing he does is to describe, in exhaustive detail, everything that happened on the day Kennedy was shot. Then, in the second half of the book, Bugliosi takes each of the leading conspiracy theories -- that there was a second Oswald, that the mob plotted the assassination, that the CIA did it and so on -- and demolishes their claims.

No one can prove definitively the non-existence of a conspiracy. Still, it does not take a genius to understand, as Bugliosi puts it, that "no group of top-level conspirators would ever employ someone as unstable and unreliable as Oswald to commit the biggest murder in history, no such group would ever provide its hit man with, or allow him to use, a twelve-dollar rifle to get the job done, and any such group would help its hit man escape or have a car waiting for him to drive him to his death, not allow him to be wandering out in the street, catching cabs and buses to get away, as we know Oswald did."

If you read, or even read around in this book and still come to the conclusion that Oswald was part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, you are likely to believe that black helicopters have been sent by the feds to enforce the Endangered Species Act. Yet since at least one member of Congress, the late Helen Chenoweth, was certain the helicopters were up there, it is doubtful that even Bugliosi's prosecutorial skills will deter conspiracy theorists from their speculations. If anything, the publication of his book is likely to be followed by the appearance of numerous refutations. For those in the business of debunking the case that Oswald acted alone, Reclaiming History is too tempting a challenge to avoid.

Why do conspiracy theories surrounding JFK's assassination never die? One possible explanation is that even if there was no conspiracy in place to assassinate him, real conspiracies have proliferated since. Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair, the decision to fire eight U.S. attorneys -- all of them were carried out in secret by governmental officials telling the public one thing while doing another. Perhaps we project a conspiracy back onto the Kennedy years as a way of coming to terms with the more unseemly realities of contemporary politics: Seeing evidence of sinister motives now, it is easier to attribute them to people then.

Conspiracy theorizing, in addition, offers an element of closure to an otherwise inexplicable tragedy. In their own rather odd way, conspiracy theorists insist that there is reason in the world; a person of accomplishment is killed, not because some crazy guy got hold of a rifle, but because some organized interest -- the Mafia, the anti-Mafia, the communists, the anti-communists -- wanted him killed. There may not be any evidence for the charge. But compared to those who believe that nothing is real or rational -- a position held by some on both the religious right and the postmodern left -- conspiracy theorizing is an attempt, however flawed, to bring order out of chaos.

And then there is the unavoidable political question. Kennedy's was the first of three political assassinations, and whatever your views, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., were all men of eloquence and courage cut down in the prime of their lives. With their deaths, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has not recovered. It is one thing to mourn their deaths and another to mourn the death of ideas of equality and justice; many more Americans do the former than the latter. Still, for those Americans who find themselves unhappy with the conservative direction of American society, raising questions about Kennedy's death may be a futile, if understandable, effort to keep Kennedy alive -- and in that way to live an alternative history of the United States in which liberal ideas live on.

Bugliosi is right that this case is, and ought to be, closed. And I share his distaste for the wild finger-pointing and often paranoid reasoning of the Warren Report's critics, from the overweening New York State Assemblyman Mark Lane in the 1960s to the irresponsible filmmaker Oliver Stone in the 1990s. Still, maybe there should be a place kept for the conspiracy theory buffs. After all, they care passionately about one of the most important political events in our history. In an age of indifference, their attention to public life, however corrosive, can be more valuable than apathy and indifference.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.