Reclaiming history

I did not read every single page of this door-stopping 1600-page book, but I read an upsetting number of them. In reading “Chaos,” Tom O'Neill's book about the Manson case (prosecuted by Bugliosi), I became interested in Bugliosi as a serially dishonest prosecutor and writer (at least w/r/t the Manson case) with bizarre personal antics (accusing his milk-delivery man of cuckolding him), and then I was reading about his career as a writer after “Helter Skelter,” the largest tome of which is this incredibly long treatment of the Kennedy assassination, which he uses to conclude that he agrees with the Warren Commission. So I checked it out from the library, intending to skim it, and found it surprisingly readable. The highlights are probably the minute by minute accounts of the days of the assassination and its immediate aftermath, then a full length biography of Oswald, who remains enigmatic simply because he was murdered (on live television no less) two days after his arrest.

Bugliosi also spends hundreds of pages debunking individual conspiracy theories, no matter how dumb they are. Rather, the dumber the better, because it serves his overall message that the theories are all that dumb. In doing so he has to acknowledge the existence of many true conspiracies, such as the CIA trying to topple numerous governments around the world (and often succeeding), to assassinate Castro in connection with the mob, and so on. It's just that none of this stuff happens to be connected to Oswald (not a guy who ever got along with anyone).

I have become interested as a genre in incredibly long books, books that the authors simply could not bring themselves to shorten. Here we learn things of the seemingly minutest possible detail, such as what meal Lee and Marina Oswald ate together on a particular night (cheeseburgers), the flavor of soda that Jack Ruby bought (celery?) and was trying to bring to a radio station host, and so on.

While Bugliosi may be an unlikable figure, and his tone here is often quite self satisfied, I ultimately find the bottom-line argument (Oswald acted alone to kill Kennedy) persuasive. As to Oswald's motive, it's quite a bit less persuasive, but perhaps no one can be. The portrayal is of an impulsive act that he likely only chose a day or two beforehand, as a result of a lot of coincidental opportunities (the parade happening to cross directly in front of the building where he worked), and out of some combination of a desire to make a name for himself and to strike a blow on behalf of Castro and Cuba. That year, in Miami and other places, Kennedy had been openly speaking about his support for additional coup attempts in Cuba. As a murder motive it's not very logical (no reason to believe that Johnson would act any differently toward Cuba), but obviously people are capable of acting illogically.

But logistically the argument is sound that Oswald would have been capable of firing from that window the two shots that hit the president, once you see that he wouldn't really have to re-aim between the two (pointing down from the window toward the car, which was driving downhill in a straight line away from the sight line from the window), and that where Connally's seat was positioned (not directly in front of Kennedy), that the first shot would have been capable of passing through Kennedy and hitting him where it did. Finally, the Zapruder film (as you see in Oliver Stone's JFK) makes it look somewhat plausible that Kennedy may have been shot in the head from the front, because he jerks backwards. But the persuasive case is made here that he jerks straight because of the traumatic damage of being shot in the brain, rather than as a response to whichever direction the bullet came from.

It's also a useful book in its discussion of the oddity of coincidences and the array of bizarre personalities that could be seen if you look under any rug in 1963 America. I think you could find the same kind of things if you chose to analyze almost any event in human history with the kind of scrutiny that the JFK assassination received. Bugliosi in writing about this is insightful, because the literature on his topic is neverending, and seems to have consumed decades of his life. We must resist in this case and in life generally, the desire to reject the probable truth of the case simply because it's narratively unsatisfying (Oswald's murky and/or dumb motive, the series of contingencies that allowed Oswald to kill Kennedy and then Ruby to kill Oswald) and try to replace them with a meaning behind the killing (say, that some powerful entity was trying to stop Kennedy from ending the Cold War ... he would not have done that). But I also don't believe that the search for “the truth” in a criminal case is ever really finished, or that our system of “law and order” is one that has much if any merit, and its function in ushering millions of people into our bloated criminal punishment system is a destructive and evil one.

So as far as prosecutors go, I would rather they spend their time writing books like this, chasing phantoms, and conducting fake trials (Bugliosi “convicted” Oswald for a lengthy TV trial in London in 1986), rather than using their time to put real, living people in prison or on death row.