Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation And Why
This meticulous but tendentious dissection of the official JFK assassination probe commits the very sins it condemns. Historian McKnight (The Last Crusade: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI and the Poor People's Campaign) argues that the commission embraced the politically safe lone-gunman theory from the outset and therefore slanted its investigation, ignored crucial leads and discounted contradictory evidence and witnesses. Examining mountains of documents, McKnight presents a well-researched, if dense and disjointed, indictment of a biased and sloppy commission and an obstructionist FBI. He interprets the errors and irregularities as the cover-up of a conspiracy, as he revisits such conspiracist touchstones as the Zapruder film, the position of Kennedy's neck wound, the single-bullet theory and the "false Oswald" reports. Insisting on Oswald's innocence, he floats the far-fetched conjecture that "CIA hardliners" killed Kennedy and implicated Fidel Castro in the murder as a pretext for war against Cuba. By restricting his discussion largely to Warren Commission findings, McKnight sidesteps later research supporting the Oswald-acted-alone scenario, particularly Gerald Posner's 1993 studyCase Closed,which answered most of his objections and remains the best account of the assassination. 21 b&w photos.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.