I've never been big on conspiracy theories. In college, I picked up Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the book on which Dan Brown based The Da Vinci Code, and knocked it out in a matter of days. However, after a brief enchantment, I began to note the wide gaps and assumptions made by the authors and easily dismissed them, just as the scholarly community had decades before. I don't believe in aliens and I think Bin Laden is dead. So the grassy knoll JFK stuff was not really up my ally. However, given that I had gotten to know the author's wife, and given that he'd spent 12 years on the book, and given that Jim is a Ph.D. and former university professor, I thought I would give the book a try. It didn't hurt that names like Oliver Stone had given strong reviews.
"What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what the politicians don't have; depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole; a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that some day by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination..."
More than the how of the story, the why of the narrative is where Douglass invests most of his time. He chronicles Kennedy's conversion from a hawkish presidential candidate running on the platform of "closing the missile gap with the Soviets" to, at times, the lone voice against preemption in his cabinet. In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the moment nearest to apocalypse in the history of the world, Kennedy turned from his cold-warrior mentality in pursuit of lasting peace. He engaged in secret correspondence with his chief "enemy," Nikita Khrushchev. He stood against leaders in his government advocating for deceit and violence as a means of winning the Cold War. He championed Third World liberation, and was ultimately marked as a traitor by those who could not see peace as a viable option.