Praise from a Future Generation: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the First Generation Critics of the Warren Report

For more than 40 years, a small band of self-anointed investigators have made a cottage industry out of critiquing the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of JFK and postulating elaborate theories associated with that tragedy. Kelin—one of the second generation of critics and the founder of the JFK assassination Web magazine Fair Play —pays homage to the first generation who, unlike “craven” mainstream historians, he says, “refused to buckle under the most subversive lies ever told the American people.” Kelin explores in detail the work of a parade of investigators, including prosecutor Jim Garrison (immortalized in Oliver Stone's controversial film JFK ); Rush to Judgment author Mark Lane; smalltown newspaper editor Penn Jones Jr. (who made a specialty of investigating the “strange” deaths of assassination witnesses over the course of several decades), and poultry farmer and Whitewash author Harold Weisberg. The book retreads the familiar territory of the Zapruder film and the grassy knoll and concludes with this year's revelation of the existence of another film of the assassination, taken by a spectator. If Vincent Bugliosi thought his mammoth Reclaiming History would put an end to this debate, Kelin is determined to prove him wrong. (Oct.)