by James W. Douglass, 2010, Touchstone

I really don’t know what to say regarding this book.  Mr. Douglass has done a great deal of thinking and research on the Kennedy assassination and is convinced that the CIA orchestrated it because they felt Kennedy was moving toward disarmament and the end of the Cold War.  He frames his argument around some writings and predictions of Thomas Merton, a prominent Catholic priest and writer.

Douglass presents a great deal of information that he attempts to tie together as proof of his theory.  I do not profess to be very knowledgeable about the assassination or the subsequent investigations, so I am not able to refute his facts or theory.  I finished the book with a great deal of skepticism, however, primarily because the author was so intent on presenting facts that supported his theory.  Many of the supposed witnesses that he cites are mental cases, heroin addicts, or just other somewhat shady persons.  In addition, some of the testimony is a bit hard to believe (such as the story of a C-54 cargo plane that left Andrews Air Force base in Maryland, flew to Dallas, landed in the Trinity River basin, and picked up an alleged Oswald double after the assassination.  Another story is about an alleged plan to assassinate Kennedy in Chicago in early November.  Only the cancellation of this trip apparently saved Kennedy at that time.  The question that popped into my mind was whether the President would have been travelling in an open car on an expressway in Chicago in November?

In addition to my doubts about some of the information presented, the organization of the book was an absolute mess.  Rather than constructing the argument chronologically, the author randomly jumps around, making the entire story much harder to follow than it needed to be.  He also repeats information time after time, supposedly to prove his point.

There is a lot of information in this book that was new to me and, for that reason, it was worthwhile.  It would have been a much better book if it had been written from a more objective point of view and if it had been organized much better.