Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

I grew up with the movie JFK and like many fell for its conspiracy theories but after reading this book I cannot imagine why anyone would even hesitate to believe Oswald didnt do it by himself. The evidence presented in this meticulously researched and beautifully crafted book is completely compelling. It literally takes many events and breaks them down minute by minute, covering that tragic day and the three days following. The most shocking part, of course, is the shooting of President Kennedy and I felt like I was there, watching it all happen, so immersed in it that I felt I could stop it somehow. Any book that can involve the reader to that degree deserves the highest praise.

This is a brilliantly written and highly readable book. The events of the four days are documented virtually minute-by-minute in an excellent narrative. This work flows so well it I would like to suggest it reads like a thriller - but only in the most complimentary sense. That comment is not intended to demean a work of research and clarity that is worthy of very wide readership.

When Vincent Bugliosi wrote Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, published in May, 2007, the predecessor of the book being reviewed here, it was widely regarded as his magnum opus, a towering masterpiece which took twenty years and 1648 pages to write. In this new edition about the assassination, drawn from Reclaiming History, Bugliosi has now winnowed the original manuscript to approximately 500 pages, concentrating on the facts of the assassination and eliminating nearly all the material used by the conspiracy theorists because he has essentially disproved the conspiracy idea. Four Days in November reconstructs the assassination, giving dates and times, sometimes second by second, to make these real events come to life, and he includes seventy-nine photographs and drawings. The resulting achievement is stunning, an intensely readable and compelling work of scholarship which should eliminate, once and for all, the idea that there was more than one gunman. Photographs of the shooting, broken down into tiny fractions of a second, anatomical drawings of the wounds of President Kennedy and Governor Connolly, fingerprint evidence in the "sniper's nest" at the Book Depository, extensive photographs of the grassy knoll at the time of the shooting, and accounts from many eye-witnesses provide weighty, seemingly incontrovertible, evidence that Oswald was the lone shooter. Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson in the Tate-LaBianca trial and then went on to write Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders about that trial, is an accomplished writer who shares with the reader the kinds of details that he, as a prosecutor, counts as compelling evidence. At the same time, he is a painstaking recreator of scenes and observer of human nature. His intuitive sense of how people behave gives him an understanding of their psychology and, at times, motivations, all of which humanize this account of seemingly inhuman actions. Focusing on Lee Harvey Oswald and his dysfunctional family, the Dallas police and press, Jack Ruby and the underworld which he represents in Dallas, and the Kennedy family as it comes to grips not only with the loss of the President but with the loss of a loved one, Bugliosi provides an intimate and unforgettable look at a national tragedy which, in his hands, is also transformed into a moving series of personal tragedies. Readers who begin this book will be as compelled to keep reading, as details unfold, as were all of us who lived through these events during that terrible long weekend in November, 1963, when we remained glued to our TV sets around the clock, and the entire country shut down. Bugliosi's total dedication to providing every relevant detail, his ability to convey the atmosphere and the understandable confusion following the shooting, his sensitivity to the feelings of the innocent people and families who were permanently scarred by these events, and his honesty in recreating

Vince Bugliosi's masterful work is a devastating knock-out blow to those who, like me, once believed there was a conspiracy in the death of JFK. Bugliosi finishes and completes, in exhaustive and impressive detail, the work of the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and, quite frankly, all the other writers who have ever delved into the crime of the twentieth century. It is time to get a life, America: Oswald did indeed kill Kennedy, acting alone. Vince Bugliosi has done what I once thought was the impossible: he has convinced me of this notion. The conspiracy community was able to survive the Warren Commission Report, as well as the Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The question is whether it will be able to survive Bugliosi's seminal work on this subject. Vince Bugliosi letter to Vince Palamara dated 7/14/07:"I want you to know that I am very impressed with your research abilities and the enormous amount of work you put into your investigation of the Secret Service regarding the assassination. You are, unquestionably, the main authority on the Secret Service with regard to the assassination. I agree with you that they did not do a good job protecting the president (e.g. see p. 1443 of my book)..."

Vincent Bugliosi's "FOUR DAYS IN NOVEMBER", published by W.W. Norton & Company in late May 2008, paints a vivid word picture of the events surrounding the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This 688-page paperback is a reprint of the first chapter of Bugliosi's mammoth and spectacular 2007 hardcover tome "RECLAIMING HISTORY: THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY". So if you've already got that book, there's really no reason to also purchase this "Four Days" volume too. The award-winning* "Reclaiming History" lays out all the evidence (in overwhelming doses) to definitively show that Lee Harvey Oswald--alone--did, indeed, murder President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. * = "RH" won an "Edgar Allan Poe Award" on May 1, 2008, as the "Best Fact Crime" book of 2007. Author and former Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Vincent T. Bugliosi has referred to "Reclaiming History" as his "magnum opus", and after reading its compelling and convincing contents, such a description is certainly hard to disagree with, in my own personal opinion. "Reclaiming History", as mentioned, is mammoth in size and scope, logging in at 1,535,791 words and 2,824 total pages (which includes the 1,100+ pages of endnotes and source citations on a CD-ROM computer disc that is attached to the back cover of the book). That page count also includes all of the photo pages in "RH"; and most of those same photographs also show up in this shorter "Four Days" volume as well, albeit smaller in size. The narrative that we find in "Four Days In November" begins at 6:30 AM on the morning of President Kennedy's assassination (Friday, November 22nd, 1963), and continues chronologically through the day of JFK's funeral (Monday, November 25th). Bugliosi provides an incredible amount of information and seldom-revealed facts in "Four Days", much of which will probably be brand-new to some readers. Many portions of this book actually can be traced back to two other similarly-styled books about JFK's assassination that were written in the late 1960s -- William Manchester's "The Death Of A President" and Jim Bishop's "The Day Kennedy Was Shot". This is quite evident when glancing through the 49 pages of source notes in "Four Days", with Manchester's and Bishop's books being referenced many times within the 1,557 citations that Bugliosi provides. ("Reclaiming History", by the way, contains more than 10,000 source citations, which is a figure that probably makes it one of the most-sourced books in publishing history.) To a person who isn't inclined to believe that virtually every piece of evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald for the murders of President Kennedy and Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit was miraculously and magically "manufactured" or "faked" in some way, "Four Days In November" leaves little to no doubt as to the identity of the one and only person who was responsible for those two homicides. Or, to put it more bluntly (as Vince Bugliosi does