Best of 2005

No one has ever distilled the John F. Kennedy assassination down to what former Charles Manson “super” prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi—author of HELTER SKELTER, OUTRAGE, AND THE SEA WILL TELL, among others—has done in his new 1612-page (plus an additional 958 pages of Endnotes and 170 pages of Source Notes on an accompanying CD-ROM) magnum opus, RECLAIMING HISTORY: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which was just published by W.W. Norton & Company.

Bugliosi told me recently that the Kennedy assassination is, put simply, “a murder case.” One man murdered the president of the United States. No CIA/Mafia conspiracy. No harebrain theory of an additional shooter hiding somewhere in the grassy knoll. One man. One lunatic: Lee Harvey Oswald, who, acting alone, put a bullet in the president’s head and, in turn, changed the world.

Talking to Bugliosi about the JFK assassination, you get the sense he is speaking from experience and authority when he says Oswald acted alone. After all, he spent 21 years with the material, researching RECLAIMING HISTORY, eight of which he sat in his office seven days a week, between 12 to 14 hours a day, working on the narrative alone, writing page after page by hand on legal pads, then dictating those pages into a tape recorder so his secretary could type them into double-spaced manuscript pages and send them back to him and he could insert additional pages of new research and begin the rewriting process over again.

One might ask, as I did, “Why the heft?” Why publish well over 1.5 million words to correct the record in a 44-year-old murder case?

“There are two realities,” Bugliosi told me, “one of which is that this is a very, very simple case. Virtually everyone in law enforcement in Dallas knew that Oswald had killed Kennedy and that it appeared he acted alone. … That reality has never changed. But there’s a second reality here. And it’s funny, isn’t it, that you’d have two such contradictory realities about the same event,” adding, “Because of the obsessive fanaticism of literally thousands of assassination researchers, conspiracy theorists and Warren Commission critics, putting this case under a microscope and making hundreds upon hundreds of allegations, this simple case has been transformed into its present state.”

That present state, Bugliosi says, revolves around a thesis that even though the old reality still exists, “This case now is the most complex murder case, by far, in world history. There’s no other case that even remotely comes close to it.”

A murder case like that, argues Bugliosi, deserves the type of lengthy treatment he gave it. In manuscript form, one of his endnotes in the book—an endnote on acoustics, mind you—clocks in at nearly 100 pages long, with about 50 footnotes. “But you see,” Bugliosi explains, that type of verbosity and thoroughness is not his doing, “That’s what has happened to this case.” His job, in other words, as he saw it, was to answer every possible question he could.

Where does the research end when working on a project of this magnitude?

For Bugliosi, “Where it ended was when my editor at Norton said, ‘Vince, we’re going to press.’ If he hadn’t said that, I’d be working on this book at this very moment. In every other area of life, when all of us work on a project, we know, instinctively, without giving it a second thought, that if we work long and hard enough, we’re going to reach the bottom of the pile. In the Kennedy case, I found out there is no bottom to the pile. It’s endless. It’s a bottomless pit. So when my editor said we were going to press, it ended.”

I’m not going to insult anyone’s intelligence by claiming I’ve managed to get through this 1,612-page book within the past few weeks. But that in and of itself is what makes RECLAIMING HISTORY a modern literary achievement and milestone. Bugliosi took the time to structure the book into thirteen “sections.” With 1.5 million words involved, says Bugliosi, “It’s the equivalent to thirteen volumes.” The way it reads is that you can dive into any section of it and come out of with an understanding of that particular piece of the puzzle. For example, I read the first chapter in Book One, which is about 300 pages. Titled “Four Days in November,” it’s a straightforward narrative of the assassination itself—but unlike anything else I have ever read about the JFK assassination. For one, Bugliosi writes in the present tense.

“Why?” I asked him.

“For immediacy,” he told me.

The chapter is broken down into sections, in which the time of the day headlines each section of the chapter. The present tense narrative pulls the reader into it—beckoning one to feel as if he or she is there while the action takes place. It’s a wonderful change of pace.

Another unique aspect of the book is the narrative itself—particularly, its attention to detail.

“In a Fort Worth hotel bathroom, the president can hear the murmur of the crowd awaiting him eight floors below as he drags a razor across his face,” Bugliosi writes. “In the mirror he looks good. He has to. Americans want their president to be the picture of robust health.” Later, he writes, “The president finishes shaving and begins the arduous task of wrapping himself firmly in his back brace. As slips on his shirt, he decides to have a look at the crowd in the parking lot … he can’t see them where he is, so he tiptoes into his wife’s bedroom. ‘Gosh, look at that crowd!’ he beams.”

One has to wonder where Bugliosi was able to dig up such intimate detail to make his narrative nonfiction scream like a novel. “The record is so thorough and rich,” he told me. So many different people were interviewed, that every single nuance of the Kennedy assassination was documented.

There’s a subset of conspiracy theorists a volume as thick and full of facts as RECLAIMING HISTORY won’t ever sway. No matter what you say, how you prove it, a certain amount of people just won’t budge. I asked Bugliosi about this dynamic and how it has affected what he thinks he’s accomplished with the book.

“Some people,” he said smartly, “are allergic to the truth.”

If you ever wanted to know not only everything there is to know about the assassination of JFK, but even more, like why, for instance, all of those conspiracy theories fall apart on the facts alone, pick up RECLAIMING HISTORY, a book that, in the ensuing years will be the one resource for all JFK researchers—the definitive factual account of a cultural phenomenon, written by a writer whose goal is to explore truth, no matter where it leads.

What I loved about our conversation was that near the end of it Bugliosi said, “When you come down to it, I’m a true crime author. I write true crime.”

Music to this journalist’s ears.

For an excerpt from the book, visit http://www.reclaiminghistory.com/

May 12:

Vincent Bugliosi's "Reclaiming History" is 1612 pages plus accompanying CD Rom. I will be posting in my "Notes", paragraphs which I believe summarize some of the key arguments on the JFK assassination.

"As we have seen, good minds have differed and will continue to differ on when Kennedy and Connally were hit by a bullet, what precise frame of the Zapruder film Kennedy and Connally 'first' reacted to being hit by a bullet, what the nature of their reactions was, what position Kennedy and Connally were in relation to each other at the time each was first hit, what movements they made that resulted from their being hit, and what overall interpretation should be put on the observations. A year before he died, Governor Connally wrote a letter to Dr. Michael West, that "this dispute [about the single-bullet theory] will go far beyond our time on earth to engage in it'. I would only add this elliptical clause to the governor's words: that is, as long as we try to resolve the dispute by referring to the Zapruder film. For fertile minds and susceptible eyes, the Zapruder film can be, as Winston Churchill once said about the Soviet Union, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." But the overwhelming evidence is that whenever Kennedy and Connally were hit, or first reacted to being hit, they were both struck by the same bullet."

from Reclaiming History: The Assassination Of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi (W.W. Norton) Page 482.

April 30:

Kenneth Tynan is one of my long time favorites...maybe if I pass along some of my favorite passages you might catch the "Tynan" fever as well...

"Laurence Olivier at his best is what everyone has always meant by the phrase 'a great actor.' He holds all the cards; and in acting the court cards consist of (a) complete physical relaxation, (b) powerful physical magnetism, (c) commanding eyes that are visible at the back of the gallery, (d) a commanding voice that is audible 'without effort' at the back of the gallery, (e) superb timing, which includes the capacity to make verse swing, (f) 'chutzpah--the untranslatable Jewish word that means cool nerve and outrageous effrontery combined, and (g) the ability to communicate a sense of danger.

from Kenneth Tynan Profiles...Selected and edited by Kathleen Tynan and Ernie Eban with preface by Simon Callow (Harper Perennial)

April 23:

Farley Granger devotes several short chapters on Nicholas Ray in his autobiography, Include Me Out (St. Martin's Press). I knew Nick and I welcomed Granger's comments on working with him.

April 20:

The following is Roger Corman's formula for making movies...it seemed to have worked!!

1. spend no money

2. play up the basest, most sensationalist angle

3. exaggerate wildly in the advertising

4. book each film in as many theatres at once as possible to forestall negative word-of-mouth

from...American Independent Cinema...An Introduction by Yannis Tzioumakis (Rutgers University Press)

April 13:

I've known a couple of people who have ended their own lives. Both planned the opportunity. The following passage describes Ernest Hemingway's suicide...
"Papa may have drunk heavily, been verbally abusive to her, and groped every woman within arm's reach, but Mary knew that once he was gone, she would be in charge. She would be the one to organize his letters and posthumous novels, and eventually get to put in her own two bits with her memoirs, "How It Was". That would be her reward, and when she'd had enough of his depression and threats to kill himself, she cleared the path to his suicide by leaving the keys to his gun rack where she was sure he could get them."
from... Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir by John Hemingway (The Lyons Press)

March 30:

Rarely in life is a common human being taken into confidence and is granted entrance into a secret world known to few...

"This morning, after Besar and Lansdale had left for Ramsey's laboratory, Oppenhemer simply said to Tibbets: 'You had better know everything.'

Pandora's box was finally being opened for the flier.

Here at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer began, men were delving into the unknown world, asking such questions as 'what is matter?' and 'how short can a 'short time' be? Here, they spoke of thousands of tons of energy as if energy could be weighted. They talked of a thousandth and then a millionth of a second as they devised ways to reduce time itself almost to nothing. They argued over the relative merits of the gaseous diffusion and electro-magnetic processes for separating uranium-235 from uranium-238; the U-235 produced could be measured in thimblefuls.

These men were also discovering the special nature of a chain reaction, and studying the unique problem of critical-mass: how to bring together two lumps of uranium-235 of the right potency to cause an atomic explosion at the right time.

Oppenheimer reduced the problem to a few words. "Time. That's the problem, Colonel. Getting the timing right. If we are successful in solving that, then your problems will begin.'

The scientist looked benignly at Tibbets. 'There will probably be problems right up until the moment the bomb explodes.' Sparing Tibbets the mass of details behind years of research, Oppenheimer explained how they intended to build the uranium bomb. A suitable mechanism had to be devised to bring two hemispheres of uranium-235 into contact quickly so that their combined mass reached the critical point and detonated. The amount of uranium-235 to be used, the size of the two spheres, the speed with which they must collide, the scattering angle, the range of the neutrons by the chain reaction--those, Oppenheimer said, were just some of the questions to be answered."

from...Ruin From The Air: The Enola Gay's Atomic Mission to Hiroshima by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts (Scarborough House Publishers)

March 23:

When I started booking Talk Radio for the fabulously talented Ed Buggs, right after the Jon Benet Ramsey murder, my first celebrity guest was Joe Pistone (Donnie Brasco). His book and movie were big hits and I was honored to get him on the show! As I write this today Joe's on The Michael Dresser Show this afternoon for his new book...Unfinished Business. Again I'm honored.
In "Unfinished Business", Joe Pistone describes what might have been if his FBI handlers had left him out there a little while longer.
"If a made man was with us he would be introduced in a different way. 'Lefty's a friend of "ours", Lefty could stay, but I would have to go to another table.
When you plant a spy you want him to have access to information. Otherwise, What's the point? As a mere connected guy I could not mingle with made men from other families unless someone like Sonny called ahead of time or unless I was formally introduced and had a made man with me. If I had been a made man I would have had the freedom to go wherever I wanted and hang out with Gambino men under John Gotti; Genovese men under Fat "Tony" Salerno; Colombo men in Brooklyn under Carmine Persico; and Lucchese men under Tony Ducks Corallo."from... Unfinished Business by Joseph D. Pistone and Charles Brandt (Running Press)

March 17:

I just celebrated my 13th year in recovery and a very instrumental author during the past decade has been Dennis Wholey. His book, The Courage To Change, especially the Elmore Leonard chapter, is a cornerstone of my sobriety foundation. Mr. Wholey's new book reflects some of this...

"At peak tolerance, I was a quart-of-Black-&-White-scotch-and -60-milligrams-of-Valium-a-day addict. Thank God, that nightmare ended more than twenty-five years ago. I write these few lines about me to let you know that even the most self-defeating, harmful, and painful behavior can be stopped and stay stopped.

"Actions really do speak louder than words. They can help us achieve or sabotage our goals, contribute to or damage our health, promote or negate our happiness.

"Do your behaviors make you feel better or worse about yourself? Do your actions make you feel positive, happy, and enthusiastic about living? Do they make you feel joyful? Or do your behaviors and actions diminish your sense of well-being, your self-worth, your happiness?

"Faith is the belief in the experience of other people. It's a definition I heard a long time ago, and it's a beginning that works. Other people have lost weight, quit drugs, stopped gambling, left abusive relationships, or stopped being habitually jealous or angry. The world is full of people who have brought about dramatic changes in their lives. They did it--and so can you."Why Do I Keep Doing That? Breaking the Negative Patterns in Your Life by Dennis Wholey (Health Communications)

February 8:

The current scandals involving the Catholic clergy makes the following quote most timely...

"But, on the other hand, we look like anyone else. We have the same weaknesses as other men, some to the bottle, or a woman, or a dollar, or a desire to be a little higher in the hierarchy of power. Each priest is man with a body of soft clay. To keep that treasure pure, he has to be stretched out on a cross of fire. Our fall can be greater than the fall of anyone else because of the height from which we tumble. Of all the bad men, bad religious men are the worst, because they were called to be closer to Christ." Treasure In Clay...The Autobiography Of Fulton J. Sheen...Doubleday, 1980...page 4.

February 8:

I have always been fascinated by Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove". I know Kubrick devoured everything on the subject of nuclear annihilation. The George C. Scott character of General Buck Turgidson, I have heard, was based on the career of General Curtis Lemay. I ordered Lemay's autobiography off Amazon and discovered the following quote...

"...No matter how you slice it, you're going to kill an awful lot of civilians. Thousands and thousands. But, if you don't destroy the Japanese industry, we're going to have to invade Japan. And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan? Five hundred thousand seems to be the lowest estimate. Some say a million.
...
We're at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed? Mission With Lemay...My Story by General Curtis Lemay with MacKinlay Kantor...Doubleday, 1965...page 352

December 29:

I like to visit used bookstores. A new one opened on Broadway near Bryn Mawr in Chicago. I can't imagine a better way to use time while waiting for an appointment.

As I go through the various sections my thoughts travel with my past life. I pick up Sen. John Glenn's autobiography to see if he mentions his wife's stuttering problem. (I stutter too!) And he does! 3 pages on her special, intense treatment.

On my way out I notice the book that will come with me...Crusade In Europe...Dwight D. Eisenhower's definitive history of World War II. An Avon paperback with a special tag on cover stating...over one million copies sold worldwide! Cover price, $1.25!!!!! 1948.

The book is a gem with stories of FDR, Patton, Bradley, Churchill, Montgomery, etc. 550 pages and I'm still plowing through! A few minutes of browsing as turned into days of thorough enjoyment.

Stop by a used bookstore in your town and tell the owner thanks. I did and always do.

September 14:

The creative peaking of artists has always interested me, especially movie directors such has Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder and even Alfred Hitchcock. The following is Orson Welles explaining what happened to his pal, John Barrymore's, great career...

...after the supreme performance Barrymore gave at the dress rehearsal of his first "Hamlet", 'the rest of his life' says Welles, 'was anti-climax':
...
There wasn't anything left to do except go on imitating, as accurately as possible that one great evening...the truth is that after that dress rehearsal, Jack began to fear that he couldn't do anything else as good again. I think he was afraid to find out for certain, so he set about destroying himself, as publicly and as entertainingly as possible...he used to tell me that he hated theatre. But he couldn't kid either one of us. We spent hundreds of hours together, planning the production of a dozen plays. And I began to guess that what he hated was the responsibility of his own genius. jack wanted to keep it a secret from both of us.from Orson Welles: Hello Americans by Simon Callow (Viking) page xvii.

September 11:

Chicago has great used bookstores. I started going to Clifford Schuller's on Montrose & Broadway in the 1950's. Today I regularly go to the Gallery Bookshop under the Belmont 'L' stop run by my very old friend Bill and the Shake, Rattle and Read next to the historic Uptown Theatre and run by my very old friend, Rick. There are others but these two always deliver...always. I find lots of stuff in both places, but the following quote I found in Rick's place..

He could have added a few: if only the Tone's No. 4 plane had gotten off on time, they would have discovered the U.S. fleet before rearming for that second attack on Midway...if only the enemy dive bombers had attacked a few minutes later, Nagumo's own strike would have been launched...if only they had attacked the American carriers right away, as Yamaguchi wanted, instead of holding back until all the planes were ready...
...
There were deeper weaknesses too. In the last analysis the whole Midway plan depended too much on the U.S. fleet reacting exactly the way the Japanese expected. It frittered away Yamamoto's great strength all over the Pacific, instead of concentrating his ships where needed. And finally it reeked of overconfidence--of a dangerous contempt for the enemy--that the Japanese perhaps best described as "victory disease."
...
It would have been so easy to have had a better submarine cordon, a stronger air search, an extra carrier on the scene. Incredible Victory by Walter Lord (PocketBook, 1968) pages 253-54.

September 4:

In my continuous updates on WWII, I have come across the truly dark chapter of Hitler's grand plan...what he was doing with the POW's. The reader can start with Chapter 27...The New Order...page 1223. Grim is an "up" word in this contest. See: The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William L Shirer, 30th Anniversary Edition (Fawcett Crest PB).

August 20:

Every now and then I run across a personal confession in a memoir that answers many questions on many subjects...the following speaks for itself and I will leave the reader to his own reflections and quiet thoughts:

For had I only wanted to, I could have found out even that Hitler was proclaiming expansion of the Reich to the East; that he was a rank anti-Semite; that he was committed to a system of authoritarian rule; that after attaining power he intended to eliminate democratic procedures and would thereafter yield only to force. Not to have worked that out for myself; not, given my education, to have read books, magazines, and newspapers of various viewpoints; not to have tried to see through the whole apparatus of mystification--was already criminal. At this initial stage my guilt was as grave as, at the end, my work for Hitler. For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences--from the very beginning. Inside The Third Reich: Memoirs by Albert Speer and translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston with introduction by Eugene Davidson (Bonanza & Macmillan Books) page 19.

August 18:

I have been reading a lot on World War II the past several years and I finally found the definitive day that turned the war around and allowed freedom to move forward. Sept. 15, 1940...a Sunday. I'll let Winston Churchill take it from here...

Although post-war information has shown that the enemy's losses on this day were only fifty-six, September 15 was the crux of the Battle of Britain. That same night our Bomber Command attacked in strength the shipping in the ports from Boulogne to Antwerp. At Antwerp particularly heavy losses were inflicted. On September 17, as we now know, the Fuehrer decided to postpone "Sea Lion" indefinitely. It was not till October 12 that the invasion was formally called off till the following spring. In July, 1941, it was postponed again by Hitler till the spring of 1942, 'by which time the Russian campaign will be completed." This was a vain but an important imaging. On February 13, 1942, Admiral Raeder had his final interview on "Sea Lion" and got Hitler to agree to a complete "stand-down." Thus perished "Operation Sea Lion." And September 15 may stand as the date of its demise. The Second World War: Their Finest Hour by Winston S. Churchill (Houghton Mifflin, 1949) page 337.

August 17:

After reading the biography of super-actress Patricia Neal, I was struck by the strange case of Dashiell Hammett. The legendary author was sentenced to 10 years and served 6 months in federal prison for contempt of Congress for taking the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-American Committee, while his good friend Lillian Hellman refused to name names and was excused and not charged in Feb. of 1952. For more on this, read Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life.

August 15:

The New Yorker issue of 7/24/2007 profiles Hollywood's legendary lawyer, Bertram Field and his past association with Hollywood gumshoe, Tony Pellicano. I met TP in the 1970's when I was researching a book, Among The Missing, and he was a private detective working out of Westchester, Ill. I found the following quotes about him most revealing!

"In 1996, Steven Gruel, as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, used Pellicano as an independent expert to authenticate F.B.I. evidence. "He was the best witness I ever had," says Gruel, who last year went into private practice in San Francisco and today is Pellicano's lawyer.
...
He promised clients that he would "make their tormentors 'remember why they're afraid of the dark.'"
...
He came up with stuff that other people didn't. He did that over and over again. He was just better...I don't know how he did it. It certainly wasn't wiretapping.
...
He will not provide the government with that gift. He is not a rat. My loyalty never dies.
...
I know the pressures he had. He would call me and say, 'Can't you get me any work?' His expenses were enormous. It's inexcusable. But I can't be too hard on Anthony Pellicano. This is a guy who did good work for us.
...
More trials are upcoming for TP and his pals... lets all re-rent Chinatown and listen to Faye Dunaway screaming before she was shot to death..."He owns the POLICE!". "

August 14:

Every now and then a movie scene or a line from a book...stops me cold in my tracks and that unknown thing Hemingway always referred to as "the stuff that makes butterflies fly" rubs against me for a brief second. Nicholas Ray told me of Bogart's speech in Knock On Any Door and Ayn Rand has talked of Gary Cooper's speech in The Fountainhead. I am now going to present some background on another speech, Anthony Hopkin's in Amistad. Get the CD and show it to everyone you know, especially people under 14.

The following quotes are from Lester D. Friedman's Citizen Spielberg (University of Illinois Press) pages 270-283.
"So when I heard the story, I immediately thought that this was something that I would be pretty proud to make, simply to say to my son, "look, this is about you."

I kind of dried it out and it became too much of a history lesson.

My take, and the take that was followed, was that Cinque...saves John Quincy Adams, just as Adams saves him...Cinque freed Adams by getting him to the Supreme Court where he could finally rage against slavery and so carry on the work of his father.

We understand now, we have been made to understand, and to embrace that understanding, that who we are "is" who we were.. We desperately need your strength and wisdom to triumph over our fears, our prejudices, ourselves. Give us the courage to do what is right. And if it means Civil War, then let it come. And when it does, may it be finally the last battle of the American Revolution.

This time, however, the threat arises not from nature or outer space but from the monster inside the human psyche that sanctions the savage treatment of other human beings, ultimately creating a system of inequality, brutality, and death."

Notes from 2007