Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Bill O'Reilly chose a title to suck people in. After his great success with Killing Lincoln, which was a great book, one would have expected more insight into the actual assassination of President Kennedy. If that is what you are expecting from this book you will be highly disappointed. There is almost nothing about the assassination and what there is is so glossed over as to be useless. If you want alot of garbage about JFK's sex life and Jackie's fashion couture, this is the book for you. If you want a thimble full of insight into the Cuban Missile crisis, buy this book. If you want a half teaspoon of interesting material on our involvement in Viet Name leading up to LBJ's expansion of the war, you are going to love this book. But if you really think you are going to get anything out of the book dealing with whether Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, or whether there was a conspiracy, forget it. You can count in words, not even paragraphs the space that O'Reilly spends on the actual assassination. And then he gets so many things wrong it is ludicrous. For instance, he says Oswald had sawed off the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Stupid. Look at the pictures in all the books, including the Warren Commission. That gun had not been sawed off. O'Reilly apparently was trying to make the point that if he sawed off the gun it would make it easier to conceal. Then he says, Oswald shot Kennedy standing up in the Book Depository window. That is ridiculous. In the sniper's nest, if it was one, only the lower window was open. How could a man standing up fire through the lower part of the window. If there was a shooter there, he was sitting on the floor resting the gun on the window sill. Also O'Reilly makes the absurd statement that Oswald dropped the gun and ran from the room. Wrong! He so carefully hid the gun behind a stack of boxes that it took a great deal of time for the police to find it that afternoon. O'Reilly completely ignores key information about the assassination, such as the fact that every Trauma Room Doctor in Trauma Room 1 at Parkland Hospital called the wound in the front of Kennedy's throat an "entry wound." These were doctors who dealt with emergency room situations every day and had seen literally hundreds of gunshot wounds. And every one of them said the wound without any doubt was an entry wound. And O'Reilly has a wound in the back of Kennedy's neck. There was no such wound. It was in the upper back below the line of the shoulder blades. And the autopsy doctor wrote that he probed that wound and it stopped in the back. It did not traverse Kennedy's body, so it could not have exited the front. How did Oswald, a malcontent and someone who never accomplished anything get into Russia - all on his own? Highly doubtful. And when he got there as a 22 or 23 year old man just out of the Marines, he spoke Russian so well that Marina though he was a Russian. How did that happen with his limited education? Military language school is a distinct possibility and there are many holes in Oswald's service record that have never been explained. If he was such a great marksman and if he tried to shoot General Walker, which O'Reilly actually spends more time on than the shooting of Kennedy, how did Oswald miss Walker from right outside his study window. Nothing in O'Reilly's book makes any sense. Having said all that, just as with the Lincoln book, the Kennedy book is well written. It is easy to read and in places is enjoyable. But it is mostly pablum. It has very little of substance and is very gossipy. You can read a great deal about Frank Sinatra and Martin Luther King, Jr. You can read about Jackie going on a cruise with her sister, Lee aboard Aristotle Onassis' yacht after her baby died in August 1963. But this cannot be taken as a serious book. If you want to read about the assassination there are so many other books to choose from, don't waste your time on this piece of garbage.