A Cruel and Shocking Act

November 4, 2013
This sober and powerful book, in spite of its headline-grabbing subtitle, is more a secret history of the Warren Commission than a secret history of the J.F.K. assassination itself. As in his The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, Shenon, a former New York Times reporter, affords the reader access to the behind-the-scenes deliberations and dynamics that shaped a historic inquiry into a national trauma. Positive word about Shenonâs first book prompted a prominent lawyerâwho had been a young investigator on the Warren Commissionâto ask Shenon to tell the story of the commissionâs staff, âthe then young lawyers who did the actual detective work in 1964.â The result is likely to frustrate both those who are adamant that a conspiracy was behind the killing, and those convinced that the Warren Commission got everything right. Shenon successfully portrays the unethical approach of the most prominent early conspiracy theorist, Mark Lane, and rigorously avoids speculating beyond what the evidence demonstrates. But the combination of destroyed records, unpursued investigative leads, and lies by senior government officialsââmost especially at the CIAââwill leave most reasonable readers unsettled as to whether the truth has yet been discovered. Maps and photos.

December 1, 2013
Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination comes this startling book, which deepens the case for conspiracy while turning some existing conspiracy theories on their heads. In 1964, the Warren Commission promulgated the lone-gunman theory of the assassination, which held that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing the president. Former New York Times reporter Shenon, who had previously investigated the investigators in The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (2008), writes that he was approached by a lawyer who had worked, as a young man, for the Warren Commission and who said that other once-young men had stories to tell before they passed on. Their stories are several; blended with the author's own five-year campaign of reporting and research, they do not speak well for the nation's intelligence services. (Whether things have gotten better or worse since then will be a matter of debate.) The aristocratic CIA competed with the blue-collar FBI for control of evidence and narrative; each agency had eyes on Oswald, but neither acted properly to contain him, even as Oswald, unlike other American soldiers who defected to the Soviet Union, was placed under special surveillance. Had either acted on available intelligence and arrested Oswald while he was in Mexico City in September 1963, the assassination might have been averted. As it was, writes Shenon, in Mexico, Oswald came under the sway of a woman who may have put him to work as an agent of Fidel Castro's government: "There is no absolute proof...that Silvia Duran was anyone's spy," he writes, "although there was clearly plenty of suspicion about it in 1963 and 1964." There seems to be plenty of evidence to suggest, though, that the intelligence agencies destroyed valuable documentation after the killing in a rush to cover up incompetence. The reader emerges from this complex narrative feeling that the case is not quite settled, but Shenon has helped us get further than we've been before.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.