Jim Lesar, president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, sent the following letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The Committee has oversight responsibilities for the JFK Records Act, but in ten years has held no hearings.
In a book like this, a lot of the credibility must come from the reader's trust in the author(s). Unfortunately, that is not forthcoming here, writes Jim DiEugenio.
Obituary from The Washington Post by Walter Pincus.
This remarkable book could never have been composed or even contemplated without the existence of the Assassination Records Review Board. No book takes us more into Oswald's workings with the intelligence community than this one. And his section on Mexico City is clearly one of the 5 or 6 greatest discoveries made in the wake of the ARRB, writes Jim DiEugenio.
The best part of the book deals with Oswald's alleged visits to the Cuban consulate and Russian Embassy in Mexico City in the fall of 1963. This section of the work owes itself to the disclosures of the ARRB. More specifically to the Lopez Report and to John Newman's important book Oswald and the CIA, writes Jim DiEugenio.
Obituary from the Washington Post for the onetime FBI agent who ran a Washington company that he said carried out secret missions for the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Road to Dallas is a methodically bad book. And as you read it you pick up on the method in its badness. And then at the end you comprehend the reason for it all, writes Jim DiEugenio.
It is not just well-written. In some places it rises to the level of extraordinarily well-written. Almost every chapter is well-planned and organized. And the book as a whole contains a completed aesthetic arc to it, writes Jim DiEugenio.
Much of [his] material [on the Paines] is taken from the extraordinary work done on the couple by Carol Hewett, Barbara La Monica, and Steve Jones. As the author notes, this work is so potent that it was attacked by a big gun of the GOP, Thomas Mallon in his pathetic whitewash of a book, Mrs. Paine's Garage, writes Jim DiEugenio.
In reaction to her appeal to the Warren Commission's lone gunman conclusions in order to promote gun control legislation.
Freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush's oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a "cleared and witting commercial asset" of the agency.
For me, and for most of his longtime admirers, the highlights of this distinguished and fascinating book were the chapters on the Garrison inquiry and the one on the Robert Kennedy murder, writes Jim DiEugenio.
At the height of the cold war, Kennedy found a way to inch back from the nuclear precipice. Under relentless pressures to go to war, he kept the peace. He talked to his enemies; he recognized the limits of American power; he understood that our true power came from our democratic ideals, not our military prowess. He is still a man ahead of his time, writes David Talbot.
Although there are some interesting and worthwhile aspects to this book, overall I found it really disappointing. It is ... unconvincing in its overall thesis, and uses questionable sources and witnesses to advance parts of its presentation, while leaving out more credible evidence that works against that particular presentation. It pains me to write like this, since I like Mr. Hancock and think he and his organization have done some good work, writes Jim DiEugenio.
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