Four Days in November

  

Ever since me and my buddies hopped in a car to motor off to the movie theaters three decades ago I’ve had an on-again, off-again fascination with the JFK assassination. Or maybe that movie we motored off to see was Oliver Stone’s The Doors and not Oliver Stone’s JFK. In any event, I did see the Stone movie in theaters, and that was the first time I really encountered all the conspiracy conculabula clouding the demise of our 35th president.

I was hooked.

I have since, however, been convinced to a viewpoint about 175 degrees contrary to Mr. Stone’s.

Still, I revisit the assassination every couple of years.

Since moving to Texas fourteen months ago, to a town a half-hour north of those momentous events of November 1963, I’ve delved into it a few times. For instance, I’ve been to Dealey Plaza three times. I read an ancient New York Times compendium of Warren Commission testimonies I’ve had on the shelves forever. The Mrs. bought me tickets on Father’s Day for the Sixth Floor Museum at the Texas School Book Depository later this fall. And now I found Vincent Bugliosi’s Four Days in November at a nearby bookstore and cracked it open this weekend.

After reading a half-dozen or so conspiracy books (from the respectable Six Seconds in Dallas to the literary Oswald’s Tale to the insane, off-the-wall Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy) I weeded myself from the fringe with Gerald Posner’s Case Closed and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History. Both these latter books just made more damn sense to me than any of the conspiracy books I read or shows and movies I watched.

Posner’s book was a crisp and concise debunking of much of the myths and exaggerations of the assassination. Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History does the same, only in much, much more depth and detail. His book is at least four times as lengthy as Posner’s. He examines everything – not a Stone is unturned. As I recall, having read the book nearly a decade ago, it was so damn heavy I found that after I read one hundred page section, I was convinced of the Lone Gunman Theory and realized I needn’t strain my bracchioradiali and read any more.

Now Four Days in November sits in my hands. The back cover states it’s “drawn from Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a monumental and historic account of the event and all the conspiracy theories it spawned.” It may well indeed be. Four Days is a moment-by-moment breakdown, in ten or twenty minute intervals, of the actions of all the principle players in the events that occurred that November in Dallas in 1963.

I started last night and am already nearly 50 pages in. About a tenth done.

It won’t change my mind one way or the other (probably will solidify the Lone Gunman Theory in my mind from about a 95 to 97 percent probability). But it will refresh my memories of the long strange cast of characters which I will come into contact again this Fall during my visit to the TSBD Sixth Floor Museum.

For the record, though I’ve purchased 12 or 15 books on the assassination, I’ve only read a handful of those and gave most of them away to the V.A. when we moved down to Texas. Most of what I know of the assassination I learned online at a variety of websites. There’s lots of cyber rabbit holes to fall down into; trust me, I’ve fallen down my share over the years.

Anyway, after Four Days in Dallas, I plan on hitting WW2 again, hard. I have a books on submarine warfare, the Battle of Kursk, high-end strategy on why the Allies won, and a compendium of mini-biographies of the major military personalities of the war. I’m also working my way through an omnibus of 1976’s best SF short stories and, after that, will throw my hat in the ring and take a swing at one of Terry Goodkind’s mega-opuses of fantasy as a first-time reader.