Read this if you dare

I can't remember when I've read a book so gripping, so frightening and so depressing as James W. Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. Its thesis is conspiracy, and its documentation extraordinary. Moreover, Douglass puts events in an historical and political context that makes perfect if terrifying sense.

This book already has many fans -- and debunkers. For this thesis to be wrong, however, requires a conspiracy of another kind, a conspiracy of many, many eye witnesses who testify to all its key points: that there were two Oswalds, one an impostor; that doctors were threatened into changing important initial medical observations; that JFK was preparing to pull out of Vietnam and to begin negotiations with Castro and Khrushev, angering the Cold War state establishment (particularly the CIA); that in later CIA classrooms, training assassins, Dallas is used as a model for how to do it right; and so on. Reflects one on-the-scene observer of JFK's original autopsy: "...all at once I understood that my country was not much better than a third world country. From that point in time, I have had no trust, no respect for the government."

Douglass has trust and faith in the American people, A Catholic, a peace activist, an admirer of Thomas Merton (from whom he borrows the term "unspeakable"), Douglass truly believes the truth will set us free. I wish I could share his optimism.

“Douglass presents, brilliantly, an unfamiliar yet thoroughly convincing account of a series of creditable decisions of John F. Kennedy—at odds with his initial Cold War stance—that earned him the secret distrust and hatred of hard-liners among the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA. Did this suspicion and rage lead directly to his murder by agents of these institutions, as Douglass concludes? Many readers who are not yet convinced of this ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ by Douglass’s prosecutorial indictment will find themselves, perhaps—like myself—for the first time, compelled to call for an authoritative criminal investigation. Recent events give all the more urgency to learning what such an inquiry can teach us about how, by whom, and in whose interests this country is run.”—Daniel Ellsberg, author, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon