Unabashed in the Face of
Tragedy
By JANET MASLIN
KILLING KENNEDY
The End of
Camelot
By Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard
Illustrated. 325 pages. Henry Holt & Company. $28.
According to a “60 Minutes”/Vanity Fair poll released last week, 7 percent of Americans think Lee Harvey
Oswald is the guy who shot Abraham Lincoln.
That’s one justification for “Killing Kennedy,” the
latest gerund-happy book by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard (after “Killing
Lincoln”) to turn a presidential assassination into a human interest story.
This brand of highly dramatic nonfiction sells, and for good reason.
The books are punchy. They are blunt and clear, not
being burdened with an overload of pesky footnotes. But they do favor facts,
and the more numerical the better. This book’s description of the shooting of
President John F. Kennedy in Dallas includes the numbers 156 (car length in
inches); 350 (its horsepower); SS-100-X (the car’s Secret Service code name);
120 (degrees in the angle it must turn in Dealey Plaza); 12:33 (time when shots
were fired); 14 (doctors attending to the dying president); and 12 (bloody red
roses stuck to his body). All that’s missing is a partridge in a pear tree.
Bill O’Reilly
Most of “Killing Kennedy” is immersively written in
the present tense, with occasional prophetic, “little-does-he-know” glimpses of
the future. It begins on Inauguration Day, when “the man with fewer than three
years to live” has his left hand on the Bible. Little does he know that Chief
Justice Earl Warren, who swears him in, has a name that “will one day be
synonymous with Kennedy’s own death.”
The authors are not content to say that Jan. 20, 1961,
is a cold day. They must point out that “a brutal wind strafes the crowd.” And
they are not content to remain in Washington; the book quickly switches to a
“meanwhile” mention of the future gunman. “Approximately 4,500 miles away, in
the Soviet city of Minsk, an American who did not vote for John F. Kennedy is
fed up,” they write, massaging the fact that Oswald was at that point fed up
with the Soviet government, not with America’s new president.
The details of the Kennedy assassination are even more
familiar than the story “Killing Lincoln” told. So “Killing Kennedy” has a
momentum problem: it is lively, but not innately suspenseful. The authors
combat that by packing in as much volatile language as possible. It is not
surprising to find both “splattered” and “shattered” in the same paragraph
here. More extreme are examples of word-mangling like this: “The president’s
voracious sexual appetite is the elephant that the president rides around on
each and every day while pretending that it doesn’t exist.”
Martin Dugard
An elephantine First Libido is something that the men
writing this book seem to admire, though they do show some restraint. And their
vision of a heroic Kennedy runs much deeper, as with their harrowing replay of
the sinking of PT-109 and the young Kennedy’s efforts to save his crew. Still,
“Killing Kennedy” cannot resist mixing an account of Kennedy’s swimming through
barracuda-filled waters with the news that these menacing creatures “are
rumored to swim up out of the blackness and bite off the genitals of passing
swimmers.” Kennedy’s lifelong habit of swimming naked comes in handy here, too.
“Without pants,” the book points out, “he is surely an inviting target.”
When it comes to Kennedy’s decision-making during the
Bay of Pigs invasion, the authors are more disapproving. The book also offers
thumbnail accounts of the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights movement and
the escalating Vietnam War. But “Killing Kennedy” is mostly about the man
himself, with emphasis on his health, his marriage, his dealings with his
attorney general brother, Bobby, and his love for his children.
Scintillating? No. But sneakily dramatic? Yes. At one
party, the president is said to gaze flirtatiously at a young woman half his
age, who wears a coy smile and a dress with a plunging neckline. She turns out
to be Lisa Gherardini, da Vinci’s
model for “Mona Lisa,” at a time when the painting is on loan to the White
House. In their endless search for convenient contrasts, the authors come up
with this:
“But Lisa Gherardini has been in the grave for almost
five centuries. There is no way she can be shot dead.
The same cannot be said of the president.
That is why the Secret Service never lets down its
guard.
Not yet, at
least.”
However shameless it may be, the book picks up
strength as it heads for its date with destiny. Those fascinated with
grassy-knoll conspiracy theories, or the parallels to polarizing present-day
politics, will not want anything to do with this version. But Mr. O’Reilly and
Mr. Dugard, like Stephen King in his alternative-history novel “11/22/63,” succeed in investing a familiar
national tragedy with fresh anguish. Although their sources range from highly
reputable (William Manchester’s “Death of a President,”
Sally Bedell Smith’s “Grace and
Power”) to iffy and presumptuous (authors like Donald Spoto,
J. Randy Taraborrelli and Edward Klein), and include many online videos and
museum sites, they are all brought together to form a powerful historical
précis.
Apparently, 7 percent of Americans would do well to
read it.
This article has
been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction:
October 10, 2012
An
earlier version of this article misquoted a passage from the book “Killing
Kennedy” and misstated the distance between Washington and Minsk. The quotation
should begin, “Approximately 4,500 miles away,” not “Approximately 1,500 miles
away.”
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