JFK: Volume 1: John F Kennedy: 1917-1956

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Manchester, William (1967). The Death of a President: November 20–25, 1963. New York: Harper & Row. LCCN 67010496.

Kennedy has two things in common with the 45th president of the United States. Both he and Trump were sons of extreme fortune and both were second sons whose older brothers were long thought to be the heirs apparent. Don DeLillo, after extensive reading of the 26 supporting volumes to the Warren report, presented Oswald in his 1988 novel, Libra, as the stooge of a CIA attempt to promote war with Cuba. James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) begins with Castro’s coup and ends with the Dallas assassination, which the novel attributes to a conspiracy involving the Cuban interests of the CIA and the mafia. Bugliosi, Vincent (2007). Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. New York: Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-04525-3. Robert Groden, The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald (Viking Penguin, 1995; ISBN 0–670–85867–6), contains almost every extant photograph of Oswald, not to mention the Mexico City impostor.Many of the official reports are available on paper from the Mary Ferrell Foundation. Essential Books on the JFK Assassination http://www.jfkessentials.com/forum/ is informative, though sparsely populated. There is a very useful collection of interviews by Alan Dale with a number of eminent researchers at http://www.jfkessentials.com/forum/index.php?board=1.0. Brandimarte, Cynthia A. "Review: The Sixth Floor: John F. Kennedy and the Memory of a Nation," Journal of American History 78#1 (1991), pp. 268-274 online The Deep Politics Forum, https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?4-JFK-Assassination, attracts those who see a conspiracy everywhere they look, hence its unofficial title: the Deeply Paranoid Forum. Some of its members can be very intolerant of dissent. In particular, critics of the preposterous ‘Harvey and Lee’ theory are not welcomed here. Whether lone–nut or conspiracy, the more implausible the theory, the more religiously it is defended. Turning to the books you selected, I thought the place to start was Prelude to Leadership: The Postwar Diary of John F. Kennedy.

Brauer, Carl. J (1977). John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction. Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231083676. Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1993; ISBN 0–520–20519–7), is a detailed account of the political milieu of the assassination. It’s hard for me to imagine people not knowing the basic facts of JFK’s life, but because we have an international audience, can you please convey what is most important for people to grasp about the man who became America’s thirty-fifth president? Your book begins by detailing Kennedy’s pre-war travels throughout Europe, which would not have been possible without the extraordinary wealth and position of his father, who was Ambassador to the United Kingdom on the eve of World War II.Brinkley, Douglas, and Richard T. Griffiths, eds. John F. Kennedy and Europe (1999) essays by experts. Most publications have been sceptical of this finding. On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison (1988), a Louisiana lawyer, and L Fletcher Prouty’s JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F Kennedy (1992), featured key source material for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK(1991), which suggested that the president was executed by a vast cabal of businessmen, gangsters, politicians, soldiers, Cuban dissidents and spooks. I think so. For example, to take a rather esoteric topic, there is his stance in favour of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, even though powerful interests in Massachusetts were against it and even though allies warned Kennedy he might be committing political suicide in supporting it. He favoured the Seaway because he thought it was in the interest of the nation, and ultimately also of Massachusetts.