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THE PEOPLE V. LEE HARVEY OSWALD

Name: THE PEOPLE V. LEE HARVEY OSWALD
Author: Walt Brown
ISBN: 0-88184-869-7

HISTORY ON TRIAL

by Walt Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1992

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Huge, gripping novelistic work that assembles the most legally relevant information known about Lee Harvey Oswald to see how he would fare if tried for the murder of JFK. While this is not the last word on Oswald, it does present the State of Texas case so thoroughly that few readers will come to a verdict different from Brown's. A former Special Agent of the Justice Department, Brown is a layman, not a lawyer. He imagines that Oswald survives Ruby's bullet, is charged with Kennedy's murder, the attempted assassination of Governor Connally, and the death of Officer Tippett. The Connally and Tippett trials have been separated from the Kennedy trial, however, and will follow it. Brown also imagines that the 27 volumes of the Warren Commission Report have been published. The prosecution goes to trial thinking that the Warren Report and the Dallas police have handed it an open-and-shut case. Quickly, though, the case against Oswald begins to fold, and the reader realizes that an acquittal lies ahead. The story is how the acquittal is brought about despite the seemingly vast case against Oswald. The prosecutor's witnesses turn out invariably to be witnesses for the defense as the discrepancies between the facts and what the witnesses told the Warren Commission destroy the State's evidence against Oswald. It's all bad news for the prosecution: what the Dallas doctors testify to; what the Dealey Plaza witnesses saw and say; the testimony of those who saw Oswald at places he could not have been (implying an Oswald imposter); the many fake Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza; the worthless autopsy report from Bethesda; and the absence of motive (many witnesses testify that Oswald liked JFK). Oswald's defender believes his client knew about a conspiracy but didn't commit murder—but Oswald's not on trial for conspiracy. A nose-breaking blow to the lone assassin theory.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1992

ISBN: 0-88184-869-7

Page Count: 656

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992

Categories:

HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY

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ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974

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Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

Pub Date: June 18, 1974

ISBN: 0671894412

Page Count: 372

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
PERIL
by Bob Woodward & Robert Costa

- BOOK REVIEW
RAGE
by Bob Woodward

- BOOK REVIEW
FEAR
by Bob Woodward

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.