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 study Case Closed,
which answered most of his objections and remains the best account of the assassination. 21 b&w photos. Agent, Leona Schechter.
(Oct. 4)
