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A prosecutor takes on the JFK assassination.

Article Excerpt
Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by Vincent Bugliosi. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007. 1.612 pp. Bibliography and Index + 958 pp. of Endnotes and 170 pp. of Source Notes on CD-ROM. $49.95. ISBN 0-19-515742-7

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IT IS ALL BUT IMPOSSIBLE TO avoid hyperbole and cliches when writing about the assassination of John E Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. The shooting in Dealey Plaza really was "the crime of the century" and those who lived through the four days of non-stop television coverage really do remember in extraordinary detail exactly what they were doing and feeling. Millions of Americans, and countless people around the world, regard the JFK assassination as a personal and historical turning point that ultimately elevated the slain forty-six-year-old president, as Vincent Bugliosi observes, "into a mythical, larger-than-life figure whose hold on the nation's [and the world's] imagination resonates to this very day" (p. xi).

I was a graduate student in history on that unforgettable day, but I could never have imagined that 14 years later I would become a historian at the Kennedy Library in Boston. And, like it or not, I would have to repeatedly confront the increasingly bitter controversy about who was responsible for the JFK assassination. In the interest of full disclosure, I want readers to understand that, like countless others, I was for a time drawn to the siren songs of some conspiracy theories. However, I am now absolutely convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the evidence put forward by Mr. Bugliosi is incontrovertible: Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed President Kennedy.

Reclaiming History is not really a "book" at all in the conventional sense. It is more like a comprehensive reference work---an encyclopedia of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath. "In defense of its length," Bugliosi explains, "conspiracy theorists have transformed Kennedy's murder into the most complex murder case ever.... The scope and breadth of issues flowing from the Kennedy assassination are so enormous that typically authors write entire books on just one aspect of the case alone, such as organized crime, or the CIA, or Castro, or Jack Ruby, or Oswald's guilt or innocence...." He acknowledges that his book "keep[s] piling one argument upon another to prove his point" but notes that "The Warren Commission also made its point, and well, over forty years ago, yet today the overwhelming majority of Americans do not accept its conclusion that Oswald acted...

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