Books on the Assassination of President Kennedy

 Books on the Assassination of President Kennedy

Books are just one source of information on the assassination, as documents, interviews, sworn official testimony, conference presentations (and their films and transcripts), news reports and magazine feature articles all provide pieces to the big picture puzzle, but since most people get their information from books, they are an extremely important aspect of the assassination story. 

Loyal reader Bob Daugherty, a school teacher, wrote to me asking about a list of books on the assassination that I compiled some years ago, that I think needs updating. 

Book Corner: Board Selections - ASSASSINATION ARCHIVES

Thanks to Rex Bradford and the good folks at Mary Ferrell for posting this, and I will update it as we go along. 

For starters, the HSCA published a 1979 bibliography of books, one chronological and the other by author and it seems that others have published and posted more updated bibliographies, that wander into the range of over 2,000 books.

IBK Notes - I will provide links to the most up to date bibliographies on JFK assassination books ASAP. 

While I haven't read them all, I have read everything that I could come across that appeared interesting, and usually find new and sometimes significant information in most books, even counter-conspiracy books like those by Gerald Posner and Vincent Bigulosi. 

Almost all counter-conspiracy enthusiasts aren't really interested in the learning the total truth about the assassination but rather are consumed with silly conspiracy theories, and spend most if not all of their time trying to debunk them, and instituting a new philosophical field of the study of the mind of conspiracy theorists.

And counter-conspiracy theorists universally divide all books on the JFK assassination into two simple categories - conspiracy and non-conspiracy, and they usually don't bother to read any conspiracy books and disparage the silly CT books they haven't bothered to read. 

As Peter Dale Scott once said, there are those who support the Warren Commission's Lone Nut thesis, and those who promote Conspiracy Theories, but there is emerging a new third type of researcher, those who keep an open mind, are independent, read all the books and documents, and don't know who killed JFK, but are trying to learn the full truth by interviewing obscure witnesses and taking the investigative leads to as far as can be taken. 

I like to consider myself among those third type of researchers, and there are others like me I work closely with - Rex Bradford, Jefferson Morley, Bill Simpich, and others.

There are books by serious independent journalists like Tony Summers misnamed "Conspiracy" and "Not In Your Lifetime," that epitomizes a real intent to determine the truth, though both books are now a bit outdated, and deserve an new edition if Tony has it in him to do it and a publisher will back him. Highly unlikely. 

But Summers also did an amazing BBC TV documentary on the assassination (circa 1979) that includes much of the significant information the HSCA uncovered, and calls specific attention to the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro and focuses on important aspects of the assassination that should be followed up on -  as I am trying to do. 

As I sit here, 60 years after the assassination, and 50 some years since I began to closely study the case, I still don't know who killed JFK, but have figured out how it was accomplished - a covert intelligence operation conducted by a domestic anti-Communist intelligence network, which certainly limits the suspects. 

It is also important to note that I didn't come to this conclusion by reading any silly conspiracy books, but rather a whole other category of books - books that I consider instrumental in understanding HOW JFK was killed, which in the end, will lead you to the actual killers, all or most now dead. 

I recently sturred up a crap storm over at the JFK - Truth Be Told - Lone Nut Administrated Facebook Group - when I mentioned that Allen Dulles took a book Assassins - by Robert Donovan, (also author of PT-109) to the first meeting of the Warren Commission and tried to get across the idea that American assassins, unlike their European counterparts, were deranged lone nuts and not part of a political conspiracy. Commissioner John McCloy disagreed with this assessment saying that a number of people were hung for being part of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln. 

One deranged lone nutter, a guy named Vinnie, admitted not having read the official records or conspiracy books on the assassination, said that sounded like something a "paranoid conspiracy theorists would say." 

And even after with being showed the facts that supported what I said, refused to retract his attack on me, and the administration let him slide because they are all back slapping friends who are convinced that one man alone killed the President for no apparent reason. 

Well, as I have said before, Dulles should have taken his own then recently published book The Crafts of Intelligence, that the accused assassin may have even read, and is reported to have been ghost written by E. Howard Hunt, as that book would have  set the stage for a real investigation of the assassination, rather than the fake inquiry and false report they produced. 

In his own book, Dulles makes note of Sun Tzu's ancient text "The Art of War," in which he details the ingredients of an intelligence network - consisting of five different types of agents-spies, Native, Double, Inside, Living and Expendable, all of which Lee Harvey Oswald experienced in his short life. 

Sun Tzu called his network a "Skein" - a fishermen's net - and when they were all working together, a "Divine Skein," as the results they accomplished appeared to be "Divine" - acts of God. 

A NEW LIST 

So in devising a new list of books that need to be read in order to understand what really occurred at Dealey Plaza, Allen Dulles' book "The Crafts of Intelligence" is number one, and Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" is number 2. 

Then there's Dulles' 0SS assistant and paramour Mary Bancroft, whose book Autobiography of a Spy, details her relationship not only with Dulles, Valkyrie plotter Hans B. Gisivious, but also Ruth Forbes Paine Young, Michael Paine's mother. 

Other books on the CIA are also significant, most notably The Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross, Joseph Smith's Portrait of a Cold Warrior, and books Smith calls attention to - Paul Linebarger's Psychological Warfare and Black Propaganda as well as David Maurer's The Big Con.

As others have also observed, Larry Hancock's relatively recent The Tipping Point is probably the most important new book on the assassination, especially his focus on witnesses a d suspects of my own - Gene Wheaton, Carl Jenkins and the Pathfinders. Larry is always a step ahead of me.

Books however, even as they go to press, are always about rwo years behind the state of research. 

There are others, that I will try to summarize to emphasize their significance as we go along. 

MORE TO COME - STAY TUNED. BK