[Firestone]

Er is een nieuw monumentaal boek (1612 pagina's) over de moord op president Kennedy verschenen.

Het is geschreven door Vincent Bugliosi, advocaat en voormalig openbaar aanklager.

De volgende review in de New York Times vond ik voldoende interessant om ze (une fois n'est pas coutume) hier te posten:

Or No Conspiracy?
By BRYAN BURROUGH
Published: May 20, 2007

I have no idea what book wears the crown of longest nonfiction title ever published. Whoever holds the record, it is about to be challenged by Vincent Bugliosi, whose new work, “Reclaiming History,” a cellular-level re-examination of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, clocks in at 1,612 pages. That’s not a typo. One thousand six hundred and twelve pages. Plus notes. On a CD-ROM. Bugliosi, best known as the prosecutor of Charles Manson and a co-author of the best seller “Helter Skelter” three decades ago, writes that his new offering, if chopped into books of 120,000 words each, would fill 13 full volumes. Note to editor: You owe me big time.

This is an awfully easy book to mock. When a 13-volume-length study of the Kennedy assassination is published, one expects it to be the life’s work of an Arthur Schlesinger or a Robert Caro. Bugliosi’s career suggests a poor man’s Alan Dershowitz, a peripatetic lawyer who cranks out a book every few years on the tabloid topic of the moment; his interests have run to tomes on O. J. Simpson and Paula Jones. None have exactly roiled the national conversation. Worse, his research originated with an imaginary trial of Lee Harvey Oswald on British television in the halcyon days of the 1980s. Bugliosi prosecuted. Judge Wapner should’ve presided. Gerry Spence mounted the defense, lost, then vented to Arsenio Hall. Or maybe it was Pat Sajak.

Not Bugliosi. He decided to start a book. Now, 21 years in the making, it has finally arrived. How on earth does one justify such an endeavor? Surely, you must be thinking, Bugliosi cracks the case. Here, finally, is concrete proof that Kennedy was killed by the C.I.A. or the Mafia or aliens from Planet Z. But no. It turns out Bugliosi spent 21 years coming to the same conclusion Gerald Posner reached in his 1993 book “Case Closed,” the same conclusion reached by the much-maligned Warren Commission: Oswald acted alone. Let me repeat: Twenty-one years. 1,612 pages. Oswald. Alone.

So this is where one expects the reviewer to savage Bugliosi for all those wasted years and pages. Well, I can’t do it. The fact is, the darned book is pretty good. Putting aside its ridiculous length, I have to say “Reclaiming History” is in spots a delight to read. Bugliosi is refreshing because he doesn’t just pick apart the conspiracy theorists. He ridicules them, and by name, writing that “most of them are as kooky as a $3 bill.” Bugliosi calls the dean of conspiracy buffs, Mark Lane, “unprincipled” and “a fraud.” He quotes Harold Weisberg, the author of eight conspiracy-themed books, admitting that after 35 years of research, “much as it looks like Oswald was some kind of agent for somebody, I have not found a shred of evidence to support it.”

What Bugliosi has done is a public service; these people should be ridiculed, even shunned. It’s time we marginalized Kennedy conspiracy theorists the way we’ve marginalized smokers; next time one of your co-workers starts in about Oswald and the C.I.A., make him stand in the rain with the other outcasts. “Reclaiming History,” though, is more than a critical analysis. Bugliosi knows how to construct a narrative, and his 316-page retelling of those “four days in November,” a book in itself, is as good a second-by-second reconstruction of the assassination and its aftermath as I’ve read.

The book’s best section, however, has to be the 276 pages Bugliosi devotes to tracing Oswald’s life from his birth in New Orleans through dozens of run-down apartments in Texas and New York — we get an address and a description of every one — his time in the Marines, his defection to the Soviet Union and eventually his fateful return to Dallas. A more intimate portrait of a loser would be hard to find. Oswald was a troubled child, a library Marxist, a wife beater and a delusional paranoiac. It’s easy to forget how young he was. At the time he killed Kennedy, Oswald was 24, a year older than Seung-Hui Cho, the killer of 32 at Virginia Tech.

It’s in the arguing that Bugliosi, as a former prosecutor, truly shines. When he gets down to the sweaty business of wrestling the conspiracy buffs, he charges into the ring as a righteous avenger, body-slamming everyone from Lane to Oliver Stone; he even throws a headlock on poor Gerald Posner, who actually agrees with him. No author is too obscure to escape Bugliosi’s attack. A Texas lawyer named Barr McClellan has sold 75,000 copies of a book that accuses Lyndon B. Johnson of masterminding the assassination; after the book was featured on the History Channel, the network was obliged to issue a statement acknowledging it was all, um, lies. Bugliosi terms McClellan’s work “blasphemous and completely false” and concludes, “Shame on a former member of the American bar for sinking to such a depth of ignominy.” Boy, remind me never to bounce a check to this guy.

Bugliosi nicely traces the rise of the conspiracy movement; authors began cranking out books attacking the Warren Commission before it even issued its report. He reminds us how early on the movement was taken over by left-wing journals like Ramparts; this is surely one of the left’s more wrongheaded crusades. Bugliosi knows, though, that more than politics is at work. He understands how badly many Americans need there to have been a conspiracy, that it’s difficult to accept that an American president, especially one of Kennedy’s stature, could have been killed by a pathetic creature like Oswald.

This book should be applauded; I’m not sure, however, that it should be read. At this length, “Reclaiming History” is the literary equivalent of World War I, a kind of trench warfare for the mind. Is anyone really expected to read the whole thing? I did, but then they paid me to. (I can now buy that loaf of bread I’ve been saving for.) Seriously, is this a book that’s meant to be thrashed through chapter after chapter after chapter after chapter, or is it a kind of prose coffee-table book? There’s nothing wrong if it is. I mean, Salman Rushdie has had a fine career. But Bugliosi appears to believe there are people who will slog through the entire book. Other than masochistic conspiracy buffs, I cannot imagine a soul who will.

Bugliosi senses this. “Many other readers,” he writes, “will say to themselves, ‘Why does he keep piling one argument upon another to prove his point? He’s already made it 12 ways from Sunday, so why go on?’ To those readers I say that the Warren Commission also made its point, and well, over 40 years ago, yet today the overwhelming majority of Americans do not accept its conclusion. ... Hence, the overkill in this book is historically necessary.”

He’s probably right, which is a shame. In an age when people under 30 seem to get their news from Jon Stewart or some guy who still lives in his mother’s basement, most Americans probably do believe that there was a conspiracy, and that it involved our own government. In other words, Oliver Stone — for crying out loud, Oliver Stone — is more believable than Earl Warren, the F.B.I. or any of the august Americans who vetted the Warren Commission report. Well, after Watergate, Cambodia, Iran-contra, Monica’s stained dress and weapons of mass destruction, I guess that’s understandable. Go ahead and buy this book if you feel the need to poke the conspiracy-mongers in the eye, or if you’ve got a month or four to kill. Just be careful about the coffee table. It might break.

Ongetwijfeld zullen de conspirationisten nu op dit boek schieten: "shill", "cover-up", enz ...
Ze zullen ook proberen de auteur te discrediteren.

Benieuwd of ze het boek zullen lezen en de argumenten van Bugliosi zullen kunnen weerleggen.