Publishers having a field day with JFK conspiracy books

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There will always be a market for books about our 35th president and his tragic death. With the hype surrounding the movie “JFK,” publishers have been printing a veritable Kennedy-o-rama.

In recent months, nearly a dozen books, many of them dealing with the assassination, have been issued by various publishing houses. Most of them are good reads, others are not even worth checking out from the local library. Here are a few:

ACT OF TREASON: The Role of J. Edgar Hoover in the Assassination of President Kennedy, by Mark North, Carroll & Graf, 671 pages, $26.95.

The money this book costs would be better spent on a couple of Chia Pets.

North is from the large pool of mediocre Kennedy conspiracy writers who have nothing really new to add to the case. A lawyer with a degree in history, he studied the case for nearly two decades before deciding to share his insight.

If not for a tremendous leap of faith needed to swallow the premise, North makes an interesting case: that J. Edgar Hoover, the notorious director of the FBI and a Kennedy hater, did not want to retire come 1965, when law would order him to do so. So, because of a longstanding feud between Hoover, JFK and Robert Kennedy, who is Hoover’s boss, the director ignores intelligence reports about the movement of assassins targeting the president. Kennedy is hit, and Hoover stays on under LBJ, a close friend.

It is fairly well known there was no love lost between the director and the Kennedy brothers. The Kennedys thought him old, senile, and a bit of a loose cannon. Hoover pegged the brothers as young, brash, and a tad too liberal. Hoover kept a keen eye on JFK’s womanizing, which is the likely reason he remained director during Kennedy’s 1,000 days.

North’s effort falls short on several counts, namely in his stretching to find scandal. A photo of JFK and Hoover in which neither of them is smiling has the caption, “Hoover looks at an uninformed Kennedy as if he were already dead.” How did North determine that, particularly from a side-angle photo of the director? Whatever method he used also led him to believe that Hoover allowed a president of the United States to be murdered. It’s time for North to try his hand at fiction and leave history to rationalists.

THE TEXAS CONNECTION: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, by Craig I. Zirbel, Wright & Co., 323 pages, $21.95.

If LBJ didn’t do so hot in North’s book, he really comes out bad in Zirbel’s handling of the subject.

Johnson, another Kennedy hater, was a No. 2 man who wanted to be the boss — that much is generally accepted by the mainstream. Zirbel contends that because of rumors that JFK would drop Johnson from the 1964 ticket that Kennedy’s Veep, along with Texas cronies, planned the president’s last motorcade route and, possibly, the assassination itself.

Kennedy, of course, went to Dallas to mend a major rift between Gov. John Connally and Sen. Ralph Yarborough, and Johnson apparently didn’t do much to quell the fire. Although the Secret Service was a bit nervous about driving the president of the United States through winding streets, which slowed the motorcade, and under tall buildings filled with people, Johnson allegedly insisted that the motorcade travel through Dealey Plaza.

Zirbel takes time to outline Johnson’s shady dealings with several Texas figures, and there is evidence that LBJ encouraged the Warren Commission line on the lone-gun theory. Johnson was no angel, but Zirbel, like many assassination writers, stretches too far what facts are known. That is not surprising from an author who owns a replica of Kennedy’s death limousine.

JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness, by Bill Sloan with Jean Hill, Pelican, 255 pages, $17.95.

Jean Hill’s book is another strike for LBJ fans, as this work also alleges that Johnson was up to his neck in an American coup d’etat.

Hill, who was perhaps the closest private citizen to JFK when he was shot, was in a restricted zone to film the president, thanks to her connections to the Dallas Police Department. As conspiracy buffs know, she is one of the few dissenting witnesses to survive the aftermath of the murder, in which more than 100 witnesses died mysteriously.

A young schoolteacher who was dating one of the officers riding in the motorcade, Hill instinctively ran to the grassy knoll in the pandemonium after the shots rang out. She believes she might even have seen a rifleman behind the fence there, and a flash of light as Kennedy reeled back in the limousine.

It was her statement to the press and government that she saw a stocky man in a brown hat and coat run toward the knoll that brought her the most trouble. After watching Jack Ruby shoot Lee Oswald on television the next day, she knew it was Ruby she had seen running, as if to help the other assassin. Hill’s media attention earned her the wrath of the CIA, FBI and Warren Commission, all of which told her she was a kook and tried, through months of intimidation, to get her to change her story to fit the Oswald-lone nut line. When she didn’t, they did it for her, altering her official testimony and invading her privacy.

Through the years of isolation, death threats, and even possible murder attempts, Hill never waivered in her belief of seeing a second assassin. Years later, she hooked up with conspiracy buffs who upheld her story, and who encouraged Hill to write a book of human courage that is fascinating and undoubtedly one of the best of the lot of recent JFK books.

JFK AND VIETNAM: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power, by John M. Newman, Warner Books, 506 pages, $22.95.

Thanks to everyone from Daniel Ellsberg to Oliver Stone to William Colby, there are few surprises left in the young history of the Vietnam War.

John Newman’s “JFK and Vietnam” brings to new levels the understanding of how intent the military was in bringing about war in Southeast Asia. Some factions, led by the recently deceased Gen. Curtis LeMay, even advocated using nuclear weapons and dragging China into the conflict.

JFK, wary of the CIA and his military advisers who led him astray during the Bay of Pigs, often reversed the plotting of administration officials. The most startling evidence in the book appears to settle, at least with substantive argument, whether Kennedy intended to withdraw from Vietnam. Some historians say he did, but wanted to wait until after the 1964 elections. Others say no, he only planned on escalation. Newman shows Kennedy constantly trying to keep his generals happy while privately emasculating their grand jingoistic designs for Southeast Asia, beginning with Laos. Either way, Nov. 22, 1963, ended the president’s long-range plans. Days after the assassination, Lyndon Johnson quietly began his quest to win the war.

A doctoral dissertation, Newman’s book is well-researched, and the reading is swift. If only the author and his hindsight were available to LBJ as he raised pen to paper 28 years ago, committing more U.S. troops to the Vietnamese quagmire that eventually engulfed his own presidency.

EYEBALL TO EYEBALL: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Dino A. Brugioni, Random House, 622 pages, $35.

Even when the Soviets finally admitted in 1962 that they indeed had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, they never came clean about whether the missiles were armed with nuclear warheads. For years, historians have agreed with that line.

In “Eyeball to Eyeball,” Dino A. Brugioni dispels that notion, proving that nuclear weapons were within 90 miles of American soil during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Brugioni, a former aerial reconnaissance expert with the CIA, spent a decade researching and writing his massive work, drawn from his own knowledge, documents and interviews.

With the title apparently taken from Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s statement just after the crisis ended, that “we were eyeball to eyeball and I think the other guy just blinked,” Brugioni’s book shows how close the United States came to invading Cuba, and how precarious was the balance between peace and nuclear holocaust.

DOUBLE CROSS, by Sam and Chuck Giancana, Warner Books, 366 pages, $22.95.

While much of “Double Cross” centers on the life and times of the late Chicago mob boss, Sam “Mooney” Giancana, the last part of the book blames just about every 20th century crime, including the Kennedy murders, on Giancana, who himself was murdered in June 1975.

Written by Giancana’s brother and right-hand man, Chuck, and Chuck’s son, Sam, the book, if true, solves the assassinations of Marilyn Monroe and John and Robert Kennedy.

It goes like this: The Kennedy patriarch, Joe, who had reputed ties to the mob in his earlier years, turned to the Outfit in 1959 to help his son win the White House. While the Kennedy brothers publicly attacked the mob while serving on the Senate’s McClellan Committee, the Kennedys secretly met with Giancana to wrap things up. Indeed, it was Illinois that gave JFK his whisker-thin victory margin over Richard Nixon in 1960.

Soon after JFK assumed the presidency, the Kennedy brothers, eager to erase their ties to the Outfit, began to turn against Giancana and his colleagues, cracking down on the mob at every turn. So, the book claims, both brothers were “hit.” Earlier, they had murdered Monroe, using a poison suppository, the book says, in an attempt to tie Bobby Kennedy to the death of his alleged lover. If true, “Double Cross” is an amazing work, tying numerous world leaders, including five U.S. presidents, to the Outfit, and outlining a sinister underworld in which the mob controlled many a nation.

But the book is poorly written, as though penned by an 8-year-old, and portrays the author, who apparently played “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” during the decades he worked for his brother, as an innocent bystander. With language like “coppers,” “micks” and “dagos,” the authors apparently attempted to capture the spirit of the times, with Cuban cigars, zoot suits, and brutal gangland slayings.

The sophomoric prose and the unanswered questions about Chuck Giancana — who says his older brother and hero told him the stuff later in life — leave the reader skeptical.

THE JFK ASSASSINATION: The Facts and the Theories, by Carl Oglesby, Signet Books, 319 pages, $4.99.

Carl Oglesby’s contribution is the Cliff’s Notes of the JFK assassination collection.

Oglesby has compiled the many theories, complete with evidence and debates. As we know by now, the list of suspects includes the CIA, organized crime, Castro or Cuban exiles, LBJ, the Kremlin, right-wingers, the Military-Industrial Complex, Jimmy Hoffa and, drumroll please, Lee Harvey Oswald.

If you can’t afford the new and improved JFK assassination library, you might want to spend the $5 for the Oglesby book, which in itself probably has more information than you ever needed to know about the subject.

ACCESSORIES AFTER THE FACT: The Warren Commission, The Authorites & The Report, by Sylvia Meagher, Vintage Books, 477 pages, $15.

If the stack of new JFK books isn’t enough, conspiracy buffs can beef up their libraries with reprints of old books.

Among them is Accessories After the Fact, in which writer Sylvia Meagher presents the facts as presented by the Warren Commission and compares them with testimony received during hearings and exhibits.

Like most JFK conspiracy theorists, Meagher believes the Warren Report to be convenient fiction, and she makes a convincing case for her belief.

John Ripley is a reporter on the NEWS Government and Politics Desk.