Since the start of the year I have read more books about the JFK assassination, including Uncovering Popov’s Mole by John Newman, which should be a subject of a future book review (for now let me say simply that it is a must read). But belatedly I read JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by James DiEugenio, the subject of this review.
I purchased this book half a year ago as part of a package that included three versions of the documentary, mostly because I participated in the film, which I have viewed a number of times. I was never in a rush to actually read it, because I assumed that it could not add much to what was revealed in the film.
Boy was I wrong!!!
From pages 15 to 220, we have transcripts of the actual documentaries (annotated 2-hour version and annotated 4-hour version). I did not read these. What I had underestimated, was the monumental importance of the last 200 pages which are excerpts from the interviews of some of the world’s top experts conducted over months of production by a legendary director Oliver Stone, guided by the leading authority of our times on the subject, Jim DiEugenio.
Oliver Stone’s record of prize-winning movie and documentary production is unparalleled when it comes to historical, political and societal significance. Thanks to his movie JFK, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Record Collections Act of 1992. This led to the formation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). This in turn led to the declassification of millions of pages of documents that have helped researchers put together the pieces that paint a much better picture of what really took place in and around JFK’s assassination. What other movies have initiated so much change?
Jim DiEugenio is arguably the most important expert on the assassination in our community. The landmark book and film JFK Revisited is a culmination of a lifetime of research, analysis, writing and networking he has performed during the last decades that has raised his stature to encyclopedic. Through his website Kennedysandking, as well as his groundbreaking books The Assassinations, Destiny Betrayed, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, he has archived perhaps the most important collection of writings on the political assassinations of the sixties ever assembled.
The documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, when all is said and done, will be regarded as a milestone by independent-minded historians, and will materialize memories of Jim, Oliver , producer Rob Wilson and the participants in this film-- despite poison tipped arrows being shot at it by career-obfuscators. Through the Looking Glass is a documentary form bookend to 30 some years of revelations that took place since JFK was viewed by millions, and lays out what we have learned through declassification, rendering the tired old platitude of criticism: “There is nothing new here folks” the summum of ridiculousness. In fact, viewers, got to hear from some 30-world leading specialists dismantling the lone-nut Warren Commission fairy tale, point by point by point. It also buries forever the war-mongering/Vietnam instigator persona that ignorant historians have attempted to lamely paint JFK with.
Among the contributors--through recent interviews or archive footage and references through articles--audiences got to hear from irreproachable investigation insiders who played leading roles in the various investigations including the Warren Commission (Commissioners Senators Cooper, Russell, and Congressmen Boggs and even Ford), the Church Committee (Senator Schweiker), the HSCA (Richard Sprague and Robert Tannenbaum) and the ARRB (Doug Horne, Judge John Tunheim, Thomas Samoluk) . These are the people who had subpoena power, questioned witnesses who were under oath, had access to classified documents, examined evidence and were hired to do exhaustive, independent work. Well they certainly did not help proponents of the impeached Warren Commission version of events.
Added to these solid sources, we can add physicians, lawyers, historians, criminalists and others who provided solid arguments that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt for the audiences that there was in fact a conspiracy in the assassination, that JFK was going to desist from Vietnam and that there was a major cover-up. I can state this with confidence because I witnessed first hand reactions of nearly 1000 audience members who attended events during Oliver and Jim’s promotional tour in Quebec City last June.
Now I ask, who comes across as more QAnonish? Those who prefer putting their confidence in some of the more vociferous nay-sayers like the late John McAdams and who deny the record put forth by people of the likes of Senator Schweiker? Or those who believe the documented affirmations of the leading investigators hired by the US Government. In other words, this documentary has turned the tables on those who are the real theorists and obfuscators by placing them squarely at the opposite end of official records!
As I was reading the second half of the book, it began to dawn on me: I could not recall getting so much insight from a book at such a trailblazing speed. By the end I concluded that JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass is perhaps the most underrated book about the assassination I have ever read. In hindsight I should have known that what was in there is pure gold. Sort of a rare glimpse of the very best insights from some of the very best experts in the field within two hundred pages.
Another way to look at this is that if about 30 researchers had been, like myself, interviewed for between 1 and 2 hours on average, in order to end up with 4 to 5 minutes on average of actual screen time, we can conclude that over 90% of the interview content had been left out so as to be able to produce 4 hours of content which also includes an introduction, narration, stock footage that are not interview-based. While reading my part and the others in the excerpt section, I estimate that the author added some 15% of the total interview content of that 90 %.. While I guess that many of the points in these interviews might be found in previous speeches or writings of the experts, the fact that one can find so much power-packed content coming from almost 30 different sources, all within 200 pages, is simply unheard of and certainly worth the ride.
After pointing out some recommendations on how I would improve this tour de force, I will give readers samples of some of the statements that really should mark people who were unaware of these, including those who saw the documentary.
JFK Revisited the Book: Its Weaknesses
As a preface to this section, it is important to note what a monumental task it must have been to produce, with limited means, two versions of the documentary for broadcast, a third one with commentary by Oliver and Jim, create a kit with DVDs, a poster, and the book, all to be launched through a minefield of resistance orchestrated by the usual suspects of disinformation artists and saboteurs.
I personally witnessed attempts to torpedo the Quebec City events first-hand. And most of us know the price Oliver Stone paid for his movie JFK. Anyone willing to invest three years of their lives into this project deserves two thumbs up for a job well done. Kudos to Jim, Oliver and producer Rob Wilson.
That there are so few weaknesses is surprising in this critic’s view, but there are some over and above a small number of typos that made their way in the writings.
- One of the extremely persuasive demonstrations made in the documentary was of how the chain of custody around the magic bullet, the conflicting documentary timelines, how this missile simply could not have created the damage it is given credit for and how key witnesses deny the validating statements it was claimed they had made. This convinced audiences overwhelmingly that the CE399 flight trajectory was one the biggest shams by the Warren Commission. One of the claims made in the documentary, that Elmer Lee Todd of the Secret Service had not initialed the projectile when he handled it, seems to be false. This error is repeated in the book. This was graciously admitted to by the authors during the CAPA 2022 conference in Dallas. The significance of this is minimal in the overall picture painted in the documentary: There can be no doubt that CE399 would have been thrown out in a court proceeding, or even turned into an object of ridicule for the benefit of the defendant.
- Jim and Oliver were both asked why they chose to keep the Lopez report and Oswald in Mexico City out of the documentary. To most of us, the revelations around this highly suspicious episode represents one of the highlights of declassification. The answers were that tough choices had to be made in order to respect constraints and that Mexico City would have been simply too complex for less knowledgeable audiences. Still, what happened there is so explosive and informative, I feel an opportunity was missed to lob a Molotov cocktail into the discourse that no historian, journalist or lone-nut officiado can counter. The audience could have heard HSCA investigators Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez reveal how: Oswald was likely impersonated in order to make him look unhinged and under Castro’s control and in talks with Russia’s western hemisphere assassination tsar; investigators were forced to downplay and reverse this scheme; Intelligence agents Anne Goodpasture and David Atlee Phillips lied their heads off; how Hoover and others proved that the claim that recordings of an Oswald impersonator in Mexico City were routinely destroyed by the CIA was a boldfaced lie; how in fact Hoover confirmed that agents who questioned Oswald after his arrest stated that they had heard at least one recording and that the voice on the tape was not Oswald’s… and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Honestly, if I had to choose between this event, and the one I covered around prior plots, I would have tried to find a way to get this one in, at least in the four-hour version and in the book.
- The reason this book has not reached the star status level it deserves is perhaps due to what I would humbly describe as a tactical error. Almost half of the book is dedicated to providing the transcripts of the documentary. This may have created a perception, that it was a derived product: some sort of merchandising throw-in. In this writer’s view the full first half of the book is a buzz-killing rehash of the documentary without the star power, imagery, music or any added value. Contrary to serving the reader by providing entertainment, it detracts from both the film version and the second half of the book. Why read this if we can view the superior documentary? One of the effects of this is that it gave secondary status to the all the explosive information buried somewhat in the second half. The other is that it turned this book into a 450-page behemoth. Clearly this collector’s item, would have benefited marketing and content-wise by exposing even more the high-level information that did not make its way in the documentary: Including 10% more from each expert, the Mexico City episode, author and producer commentary and complementary add-ons. Why not have a chapter or two on the making of accompanied with wonderful anecdotes and pictures accumulated over the years of production and promoting: Jim in Washington, Oliver in Quebec City, participants in interviews.
- Finally, one of the great features of the film version, was the use of compelling visuals that supported the presentations every step of the way. The book Absolute Proof by Robert Groden gives us a clinic on how this can be effective. For instance, in the excerpts section, Doug Horne describes a sketch made by autopsist Dr. Boswell of JFK’s head wound that is so incriminating that it compelled me two look for it on the web:
Combined with Doug Horne’s description of the three-dimensional version Boswell drew, you will see later, that we are talking about smoking gun evidence that could have used the same level of graphics support the film production-team put together in the documentary.
JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass - The New Reference for Assassination Expertise
Decades from now, Jim DiEugenio’s scholarly accomplishment will serve as a time capsule benchmark for the evolution of the research in what is still a cold case. Today, it provides those of us who are clearly on the right side of history with the most up to date rebuttals to those who have fossilized their jargon in the 1963 cover story peddled by the Warren Commission. I would love to see a keen student of history challenge his or her brain-washed teacher with some of the material I will present in this section. The answers, if honestly replied, would be “I am sorry I was not aware of that”. I know this because I have researched history books and exchanged with the writers. Out of over twenty respondents to my questions, ninety percent were not aware of the HSCA investigation into the assassination. So, try and imagine how they would explain the following excerpt samples from the second half of Jim’s book.
The following is just a miniscule part of what you may not be aware of if you have not read this book:
Jefferson Morley (Veteran Journalist) on Oswald’s seemingly manufactured fight with DRE local leader Carlos Bringuier:
Oswald goes public and the two organizations in New Orleans that give him his publicity are instruments of the CIA: The Cuban Student Directorate was paid $50,000 a month… and INCA which also publicized Oswald’s group, was also in league with the CIA.
Aaron Good (PhD, Author, Editor) on Henry Luce:
… It was implicit when he writes things like there’s a lot of money that’s going to be made in Asia… This was his big disagreement with Kennedy… What form should decolonization take?
Barry Ernest (Journalist, author) on Victoria Adams (The Girl on the Stairs):
When they interviewed her in February 1964, the Dallas Police were no longer involved in the investigation… And in that Dallas Police interview, that was the first time she mentioned seeing Billy Lovelady and William Shelley on the first floor, a comment that was repeated two months later in her Warren Commission testimony… she continually told me that she never made that statement… And that she actually felt those words were inserted in her testimony to specifically make her appear wrong.
Professor Bradley Simpson (University of Connecticut professor of history, author) on US support to Indonesia regime changes under Eisenhower:
Alan Pope was captured… It was later revealed that Alan Pope worked for the CIA. The revelation of the US support for these regional rebellions really helped to radicalize Sukarno and to convince many Indonesians that the United States was working to overthrow Sukarno.
Brian Edwards (Instructor in Criminal Justice at Washburn University) on investigation anomalies:
I confronted Jim Leavelle… I asked him point-blank, why didn’t you take notes of what this guy (Oswald) is saying? And you know what he told me? It wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the case. This is the day before Oswald got shot.
And…
There was a Dallas postmaster Harry Holmes who was an FBI informant… He was invited into the Dallas Police headquarters interrogation room to interview Oswald. Oswald is charged with murder. Why would a postal director have any business being in there? He doesn’t.
Dr. Cyril Wecht (Forensic pathologist) on missing evidence and pathologist Jim Humes destroying his autopsy notes and his first draft:
In addition to some photos and some X-Rays that are missing (at the National Archives), there’s a large metal box that obviously contained the brain listed in ‘65, no longer listed in ‘66… There were some microscopic tissue slides missing too. And by the way, tissue slides are important when you're looking at gunshot wounds to try to differentiate entrance from exit…
Humes did something that would undoubtedly lead to a murder case being thrown out.
Dr. Wecht on JFK possible neuromuscular reaction:
But the decerebrate and decorticate do not fit. You don’t see the features- an arched back? A protruding chest? And with decerebrate, the arms then out and flexed in, and decorticate, the arms extended outward. Neither of those are shown with Kennedy’s position in the car.
Dr. David Mantik (Radiation oncologist, Ph.D. in physics) on the CE399 trajectory and the Harper fragment:
But I personally spoke to John Ebersole, the radiologist (at Bethesda autopsy) … and he said it was probably T4 (entrance wound). So if that’s true, then the magic bullet is a total loss. It’s impossible…
Either you run into the lung and the lung would be punctured, but we know that did not happen. Or the bullet runs into the cervical vertebrae… But we know from the X-Rays that did not happen either.
Altogether three pathologists saw this Harper Fragment and they all agree that it was from the occipital area.
David Talbot (Author of Brothers and the Devil’s Chessboard and founder of Salon) on Allen Dulles:
In reality, Allen Dulles recovers very quickly (after being dismissed by Kennedy). He retreats to his home in Georgetown and he begins basically to set up a government in exile there…. So, people like Richard Helms, James Angleton still feel they are part of the Allen Dulles circle. Dulles is not only seeing his old CIA lieutenants, but generals, admirals, the national security network.
Dr. Gary Aguilar (Ophthalmologist and college instructor at UC San Francisco) on the HSCA treatment of the back of the head wound, mainstream media bias and the CE399 stretcher:
They said that all the witnesses at the autopsy, they all agreed to those autopsy photographs (showing no damage to the back of JFK’s head). But they suppressed the witness statements themselves. When the ARRB came along, and out come those witness statements, out comes the diagrams. And lo and behold, it turns out that the witnesses at the autopsy all agreed with the doctors at Dallas: That the defect involved the rear of the head. They basically lied about what was there…
So here you have the New York Times assuring the public that all the documents have been released and no question remains unresolved. In the absence of having seen any of the 26 volumes of supplementary evidence… They admit they are working with the Warren Commission…
To the great shame of my organization, the American Medical Association by the Journal of the American Medical Association. They published some articles that were laughably absurd and were ultimately repudiated even by members of the mainstream media.
The stretcher that it (CE399) was supposed to be found on was almost certainly not John Connally’s stretcher.
Dr. Michael Chesser (Neurologist) on the skull X-Rays:
The fragment trail does not fit the conclusions of the Clark Panel or the HSCA… So, it’s impossible for a shot here, in the back of the skull, to result in all the tiniest bullet fragments in the frontal region…
The bright object (supposed bullet part) suddenly shows up between the Bethesda autopsy and the Clark Panel. I think it was most likely… placed there shortly after the autopsy…
Chesser explains later that it is not credible that this had been missed, and also that Ebersole (the radiologist) refused to talk about this.
Doug Horne (Military Records Analyst for the ARRB, author of Inside the ARRB) on Bethesda autopsists Drs. Boswell and Humes, and on Oswald’s earnings:
Horne also explained that, contrary to other depositions done of the autopsists during other investigations, the ARRB questioned Dr. Humes and Dr. Boswell separately. This yielded a stunning result: “While Humes contended under oath that there was no bone missing in the back of JFK’s skull, Boswell said there was bone missing in the rear skull and actually made a sketch on a three-dimensional skull model (now at the archives) showing missing bone skull from the top of the head, part of the right side, and the entire right rear of the cranium.”
Boswell admitted that there was an “incised wound” in the forehead of JFK that Horne interpreted the following way: “Tells me there was an entrance wound right there, which other people saw in photographs. The photographs that did make it into the official record. There was a small entrance wound… removed with a scalpel before the autopsy started”… And also that he did not see the entrance wound (in the back of the skull) that they described so carefully in the autopsy report…. “So, the autopsy of John F. Kennedy is probably the evidentiary mess of the twentieth century….”
But the FBI report says that the entrance wound has a steep downward trajectory of forty-five to sixty degrees. That is not in the autopsy report… This three-hit scenario [instead of two] is undoubtably the content of the first draft [destroyed by Humes] of the autopsy report…
Oswald’s last quarter of earnings in the United States before he defected to the Soviet Union should have been paid by the Marine Corps. And they weren’t… That has serious implications to me because of the speculation that he was a fake defector.
James Galbraith (University professor, author, essayist on Kennedy’s Vietnam withdrawal plan) on his father and JFK:
He (his father) admitted many times… Kennedy knew what he wanted and he knew that my father would deliver what he did. Which was a detailed skeptical report about the deficiency of the South Vietnamese government. If … an army of a quarter of a million people could not prevail against less than 20,000 insurgents at that time, it was not a situation in which an outside force stood much chance of changing the outcome…
Jim Gochenaur (Church Committee witness) on Elmer Moore’s feelings about JFK and Jack Ruby:
He was giving away everything he could to the Russians… His father was an appeaser. Just like he was…
Gochenaur also said that Moore showed him an autopsy photo of JFK. Moore also confirmed that he had to shut down Ruby when he began opening up about shooting Oswald, fearing it would imply premeditation.
John Newman (University professor of history and respected author) on executive action, Northwoods:
Eisenhower got very impatient with Allen Dulles. He had told him to get rid of Lumumba. And it wasn’t happening. So, he got very frustrated in the middle of an NSC meeting and just blurted out an order to kill.
He (Lansdale) inserts the false flag operations to kill our own people: sink our ships, attack Miami, all that stuff was later Northwoods. Way back in January, Lansdale inserts it as a Mongoose thing because he is actually acting as a stalking horse for Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He is siding with them… and going against the orders of President Kennedy.
Judge John Tunheim (Chief Judge of the US District of Minnesota, Chairman of the ARRB) on assassination records:
I think it is pretty clear Angleton destroyed records before he was summarily dismissed from the CIA.
He (Connick) was embarrassed because he said all the files (Garrison) had been preserved, and turned everything over to us. When in fact he had ordered the records to be destroyed. And they weren’t destroyed.
We were misled by the CIA about Joannides as was the HSCA.
Tuenheim also noted the destruction of autopsy records and Secret Service files, how the CIA and President Bush opposed the release of classified documents and how Trump did not respect the law by stalling declassification and finally how the CIA is resisting the release of the Joannides files.
Lisa Pease (Co-editor of Probe magazine, author of A Lie Too Big to Fail) on the Church and Pike committees:
The Church Committee and the Pike Committee, it’s really the only investigations the CIA had really ever had. The only in-depth ones where their operations were analyzed and really looked at. Both Pike and Church came to the conclusion that the CIA was a rogue elephant operating independently of the president. (She points out that these committees were kind of the end of Pike’s and Church’s respective careers).
Under the JFK Act… they (the Church Committee) realize at no point did they (the CIA) ever have presidential authority. (To murder Castro) (This is according to the CIA’s own reports.)
Henry Lee (Commissioner of Public Safety for the State of Connecticut-1998-2000, chair professor in Forensic Science University of New Haven) on the second Magic Bullet, the head shot, and the forensic research into the JFK assassination:
Somehow the trajectory (head-shot) turned in a ninety-degree angle… The Third Shot, the most important shot, entered the back-right side of the head (according to the WC), and came out the front right. So, the bullet actually turned that angle…
He also deplored that the brain was not sectioned to analyze trajectory, and that one could have no idea what happened based on the messy work.
Paul Bleau (MBA, college professor, essayist KennedysandKing) on case linkage:
For the excerpts selected from my interview with Oliver Stone, let me simply state that one should conclude that no case linkage analysis was performed by investigators and there was destruction of files around prior plots. But what we can piece together surely indicates that there was a template, contingencies, and a mission to remove JFK before the end of 1963. They also suggest an angle that should be used to build an offender profile in the assassination.
Dr. Philip Muehlenbeck (George Washington University instructor, author). On JFK anti-colonization credo:
He (diplomat Edmund Gullion) had told Kennedy that the French were actually losing the war. That the war was unwinnable and that, if the U.S. were to replace the French in the war, the US would also lose the war.
After he (JFK) made his Algeria speech, the French were very upset with Kennedy…
He took a full-page advertisement (promoting the book The Ugly American) in the New York Times. He bought a copy of the book to give to every member of the senate.
Thomas Samoluk (Deputy Director and Press Officer of the ARRB) on intel resistance and Northwoods:
… the intelligence agencies kind of adopt that approach, that they (the ARRB) will eventually go away. The Review Board will not last forever. We’ll still be here.
The Northwoods records are really, I have to say, bizarre… the military creating situations that would make it look like Cuba had committed terrorist acts, had downed a US jet-liner as a pretense to invade Cuba.
The records have not been released in total, and I don’t think any good reasons have been given.
Dr. Robert Rakove (Professor of history at Stanford, author) On Nasser:
Eisenhower and Dulles had edged onto a course of confrontation with Nasser… after he opened relations with China, they canceled a loan that Nasser depended on to build the Aswan Dam. This set the Suez crisis in motion as Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.
Kennedy discerned he was actually quite modern, quite rational, quite forward looking…. Open to Western investment in commerce. He saw religious fundamentalism as a step backward… They could kind of achieve mutual harmony together.
Richard Mahoney (Professor at the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University, author) on UN Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld and on Kennedy being left in the dark:
Hammarskjöld was appealing to Kennedy to basically get Lumumba out of a military base and into UN hands so he wouldn't be killed. So, Kennedy agreed… What he did not know was that the Eisenhower administration had already decided that he should be assassinated.
Mahoney shows how Kennedy was not even told about the murder by Dulles as he found out about 4 weeks after it occurred:
They moved quickly to execute this man… they didn't tell President Kennedy at all.… As soon as Mobutu takes power, the Belgian commercial and clandestine interests and the CIA are back in business big time. And for three decades, he brutalizes his country, murders wantonly, profits at an incredible rate and becomes one of the worst dictators in the world.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (author, chairman of the Children's Health Defense group) on his father and uncle:
My uncle and father knew that US policies towards Latin America were anti-democratic and US policy was especially driven by the economic interests of American corporations…
My grandfather opposed World War I because he thought it would only benefit the bankers.
My father was horrified at the US intervention in the Dominican Republic… Jack had an interest in Cuban history… Jack was very aware of the corruption of the Batista regime.
It's very clear from the autopsy reports and the police reports that Sirhan could not have killed my father.
Edwin Lee McGehee (Possible last surviving witness of the Clinton Jackson incident) on Officer Frances Fruge, Oswald:
Edwin McGehee did not appear in the documentary. By going over the excerpts in the book of Jim’s interview with him, the reader will understand why the HSCA found the connections between Oswald, Ferrie and Clay Shaw to be credible. He will also see why evidence was made to disappear… How DA Harry Connick became visibly upset when he met McGehee… and that it became common street knowledge that Oswald had been in Clinton-Jackson.
Debra Conway (Owner of Lancer Productions and Publications) on the shells in the TSBD and Tom Alyea: the first reporter on the sixth floor:
The shells looked like they were placed in some sort of pattern on the floor. They did not look like they were ejected from the rifle. They were very close together… Much later people started questioning, you know, I’ve shot a rifle and I couldn’t even find my shells… It became important because it looked like the scene was staged… I would say that he (Alyea) was a friend of the Dallas Police, he worked as a photographer on many crime scenes and he probably knew most of the officers that were there.
Dr. Donald Miller (Professor emeritus University of Washington, Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery) on Malcolm Perry and George Burkley:
He (Perry) said it (Kennedy’s throat wound) was an entrance wound, unquestionably an entrance wound… and then in front of the HSCA a year later, he once again said it was consistent with an exit wound… the main reason he changed his testimony (WC) and publicly agreed it was an exit wound is a Secret Service agent put the pressure on him, and that person was Elmer Moore.
He (Burkley’s son and Miller’s friend) said his dad was a close hold on his professional life and he wouldn’t talk about the assassination. That the only thing he would say was that he couldn’t understand why the Warren Commission never asked him to testify…
Burkley’s signature (on the face sheet) and his writing “verified” has been erased…
Dr. Randy Robertson (Radiologist who testified before congress on the JFK case. Member of the Board of Directors of the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington) On the limousine bullet and James Young:
He (Young) was a physician (White House) who ordered Chiefs Mills and Martinell, their assistants, to go to the White House and retrieve what they knew were skull fragments at that time… He was the first one at the autopsy to see these materials recovered from the limousine… He described a bullet (among the materials) brass-colored with a bent tip, he described as five millimeters in diameter… They said it was in the back seat…
He thought he would go to Bethesda to relieve Dr. Burkley who was sixty-something at the time.
He further reveals how Young was ignored by Gerald Ford, Arlen Specter and some at the ARRB, and how he was shunned because he mistakenly referred to the Limousine as the Queen Mary instead of the SX 100X presidential limousine.
Conclusion
In this review I have revealed only seven pages out of a total of over two hundred, less than five percent of the content. I can assure you that what was not included is just as revealing. In a way, researchers will find out a lot more in these pages than what documentary viewers did.
I challenge anyone to suggest another book that included the quantity and quality of experts who spoke freely in this book. You cannot find better interviewers than Oliver and Jim. Compare the credentials of these highly educated lawyers, judges, criminalists, journalists, professors, doctors, investigation insiders with the Warren Commission apologists and tell me who you would most associate the word nutcase with… an insult spat up in the air by so many of the lone nutters who are now seeing it fall back on their faces. Not one of the participants got involved for the money… none was offered. No, they all share at least one trait… their pursuit of the truth.
The other element that is clear is that there is a high-level of corroboration throughout the second half of the writings, and that the author did a lot of fact-checking before publishing. The experts clearly do something that most nay-sayers avoid. They get down and dirty in their research and analysis and base their affirmations on solid foundations. How many WC apologists actually questioned Young, McGehee, Moore, Sandy Spencer, John Stringer, Galbraith, Burkley’s son… Not one. Never has the contrast between the current crop of lone scenario defenders and the network of real researchers been so evident. The current cast of nay-sayers sound somewhat like Joe McCarthy when he was left babbling drunkenly after having been torn down decisively by attorney Joseph Welch… empty cans that make a lot of noise.
The tables are now turned: To say that Lee, Tunheim, Samoluk, Horne, Morley, Sprague, Schweiker, Tanenbaum, Blakey, Russell, Cooper, Boggs, Robertson, Edwards etc… somehow are involved in a false flag operation, and are quacks, says more about those dishing out these mindless insults and turns the lights on who the real QAnonish conspiracy theorists are.
JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass has already convinced the hundreds of thousands who have seen it that the JFK assassination was the result of a conspiracy. Abraham Bolden thanked Oliver Stone and Jim for the effect the documentary had on getting him a pardon. The jury is out: Jim, Oliver and Rob have prevailed already.
And now mainstream media in the US, after yet more illegal delays in declassifying records, has even begun spreading doubt about the “official version”… Tucker Carlson comes to mind.
This book on its own destroys both the lone-nut and JFK Cold Warrior myths that history books peddle to high school students. They now have both the sources and arguments to counter these mouthpieces… who have begun to come crashing down like a house of cards. What's next… perhaps the release of the interviews in their entirety! Hopefully!
Jim DiEugenio is known as one of the most knowledgeable researchers of the assassinations of the sixties. His real secret to success however is his ability to network with researchers, producers, podcasters… and now international media who have come to respect him, listen to him and recognize his accomplishments, which will echo down the halls for a very long time.
Publisher's Note: This review was not in any way initiated by the editor of the book, James DiEugenio. It was, as is stated, completely initiated by Paul Bleau. He was truly shocked by the sheer amount of information contained in the interviews that were left out of Stone's two films. That is the reason he wrote it and asked to have it posted.
