Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald (2 page)

I submit to you that these are two very different experiences, and I suggest you stockpile those incandescent bulbs now while they’re still available!!

Still, while I vastly prefer to read a book in the print edition, the
Kindle
format has some extremely distinct advantages. In the first place, I can give away Volume 1 for free, and I can’t do that with a hardcopy version. So, score one for
Kindle
there.

Also, in natural light, reading a book on the
Kindle
can definitely fill the bill, especially if you have gotten the book for free.

In the table below, I’m going to discuss the various ways to read the book, in order of quality:

Kindle DX

About as close as you can get to hardcopy. Text is very easy to read, images display very well.

Kindle

Even though it has a smaller screen than the DX, it is easier to hold, and like the DX has the e-ink screen which is vastly superior for reading.
This book has been optimized for the Kindle
.

iPad

I believe that this would also be a good way to read the book; several images are in color, and the
iPad
screen is in color. Unfortunately, neither this screen or the ones below utilize the e-ink screen, so many people find reading on devices like this for an extended period of time fatiguing.

Kindle Fire

Reading the book on the
Kindle Fire
has three spectacular advantages that helps compensate for the lack of an e-ink display. In the first place, the color images, and there are many, display in color. Nice! Second, the footnote references in the book which are actually hyperlinks take you right to the source material. Click the footnote reference, you go right to the source on the web, then just click the back arrow to go back to the book. Fantastic! Third, because the
Kindle Fire
supports auto-rotate, if you see an image which is too small, just rotate the
Kindle
, and it will become large enough to read. Brilliant!

Kindle for PC, Kindle for Mac, Kindle for Android Devices

I personally would not read a book on a computer screen, but if you do not have any of the devices in the rows above, for now this will be your only option. I would definitely recommend getting a
Kindle
; as of this writing, they’re only $79, and there are so many free books out there it would certainly be worth your while.

Other methods

Believe it or not, there are some people who are going to try to read my book on a smartphone. Good luck . . . let me know if you succeed!

About the Author

The vast majority of the books written on the Kennedy assassination up to this time have been written by people who knew where they were when Kennedy was shot. One day there will come a time when these books will be written by authors without direct personal experience.

I am not one of those authors. I remember very well where I was when Kennedy was shot. I was in school, kindergarten, and the one vivid memory I have is of teachers running through the halls crying. That was the dominant image of the day, lots and lots of people crying, wherever you went. A big steel-gray cloud had rolled over America, and was not to leave for many weeks.

Yes, I knew this was a very big deal, not just because so many people were crying, but because they also canceled Saturday morning cartoons. That was when I knew that this thing was really huge, when the cloud hit really close to home.

Of course there was a funeral procession after that, and all I can remember about that was the truly awful silence, the only sound being drumbeats. Spooky. My wife recalled it as a “black parade,” her only experience with processionals like that being the Thanksgiving Macy’s Day Parade. I also remember watching the processional (or a re-broadcast of the processional), only to have it interrupted by a commercial, for Salvo detergent tablets as I recall:

I remember even at that early age being shocked that something as somber as that procession would be interrupted by a commercial for detergent.

To help give you some context, here is what I looked like when I was young, with my mom and sister:

I am not sure when that picture was taken, but I’m sure that at the time of the Kennedy assassination I was older, because I was 5 years and 9 months when Kennedy was assassinated, and I look like I am about 4 or 5 in that picture.

I think in the next picture I am older than 5 years, 9 months, probably 6. It is me holding a book called
Turtles
, which I think was one of the first books I ever owned (it probably is the first, otherwise, why else take a picture of me holding a book about turtles?):

Innocent times. A boy and his book on turtles. How things have changed . . .

I am showing these photographs because I want to contrast them with a famous photograph I’m sure that you have seen, the one where John Kennedy’s son saluted his father at the funeral procession, his mother and his uncle behind him, a photo which marks a clear historical turning point:

This is a heartbreaking image even today, but you can imagine the effect this image had on me when I was only 5 years 9 months old. When I saw the picture, I remember thinking “how sad that little boy must be.” Even though I was 5 years 9 months, I remember thinking of him as a “little boy” because he was only 3, not a “big boy” like me.

(Today I think of him not only as saying goodbye to his father, but metaphorically saying goodbye to a bygone era.) Well, in light of the image above, and dozens and hundreds of similar images broadcast daily on television and seen in newspapers, you can just imagine how people felt about Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was truly the Osama bin Laden of his day, and I doubt that even bin Laden achieved the level of revulsion and hatred that Oswald stirred up him in the hearts of the American people. Consequently, when Oswald was killed by Ruby,

there were cheers and excitement all across America, with most people ecstatic that “justice was done.” I do remember, though, that my parents did not seem enthusiastic like other people did. I wondered why. After all, wasn’t John Kennedy a
good
man? And wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald, because he killed John Kennedy, a
bad
man? And didn’t that make Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, a
good
man?

My schema was
good man shoots bad man who killed good man
, and I remember thinking at the time that what Jack Ruby did was perfectly logical, and in fact I even expected it. I was really surprised when my parents did not feel the same way.

Well, after Ruby shot Oswald, a flurry of historical events followed. By the time I was seven, I began to notice that the nightly news was, night after night after night after night, sending the same images, from a place called Vietnam:

We were in a war. I did not understand that war. All I knew was, when the news came on, we were going to see pictures from that war. And invariably, these pictures would have shots of helicopters. Lots and lots of helicopters. Thousands of them. If you were in the helicopter business then, you would have made a
killing
. But there were other pictures without helicopters, pictures of women and children. And what terrible pictures they were. I’m sparing you the gory details.

Little did I know, after the Kennedy assassination, we were leaving the world of a boy and his turtles and entering a time when the images we did not want to see came firing at us like rounds from a Gatling gun with an ammunition pool the size of Lake Michigan.

The images revolved around historical events, events which at the time we thought were disconnected, such as the assassination of Martin Luther King . . .