Who Really Killed Kennedy?: The Ultimate Guide to the Assassination Theories--50 Years Later


Jerome R. Corsi - 2013
    And on November 22, 2013, the nation will experience the 50th anniversary of one of the most traumatic events in modern American history, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. From day one, the truth behind JFK's assassination has been mired in controversy and dispute. The Warren Commission, established just seven days after Kennedy's death, delved into the who, what, when, and where of the tragedy, and over the course of the following year compiled an 889-page report that arrived at the now widely contested conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin.In Who Really Killed Kennedy?, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., provides readers with the ultimate JFK assassination theory book. One-by-one, each chapter will examine the strongest arguments regarding the killing of JFK, including theories surrounding the mob, the CIA, Cuban radicals, LBJ, right-wing extremists and more.By book's end, Who Really Killed Kennedy? will provide convincing analysis that existing evidence rules out the possibility that JFK was killed by a lone assassin. Fifty years after this epic American tragedy, there's still a gunman on the loose.

Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer


Peter Wright - 1987
    Wright drew on his own experiences and research into the history of the British intelligence community. Published first in Australia, the book was banned in England (but not Scotland) due to its allegations about government policy and incidents. These efforts ensured the book's notoriety, and it earned considerable profit for Wright.

Assassination Vacation


Sarah Vowell - 2005
    With Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other—a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage.From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry Tortugas, Vowell visits locations immortalized and influenced by the spilling of politically important blood, reporting as she goes with her trademark blend of wisecracking humor, remarkable honesty, and thought-provoking criticism. We learn about the jinx that was Robert Todd Lincoln (present at the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley) and witness the politicking that went into the making of the Lincoln Memorial. The resulting narrative is much more than an entertaining and informative travelogue—it is the disturbing and fascinating story of how American death has been manipulated by popular culture, including literature, architecture, sculpture, and—the author's favorite— historical tourism. Though the themes of loss and violence are explored and we make detours to see how the Republican Party became the Republican Party, there are all kinds of lighter diversions along the way into the lives of the three presidents and their assassins, including mummies, show tunes, mean-spirited totem poles, and a nineteenth-century biblical sex cult.

The Last Investigation


Gaeton Fonzi - 1993
    The Last Investigation is a compelling post mortem on the House Select Committee on Assassinations, as well as a riveting account of Fonzi's pursuit of leads indicating involvement by officers of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin


Gordon S. Wood - 2004
    In place of the genial polymath, self-improver, and quintessential American, Gordon S. Wood reveals a figure much more ambiguous and complex and much more interesting. Charting the passage of Franklin’s life and reputation from relative popular indifference (his death, while the occasion for mass mourning in France, was widely ignored in America) to posthumous glory, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin sheds invaluable light on the emergence of our country’s idea of itself.

Washington's Farewell: The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations


John P. Avlon - 2017
    A revealing look at the first President’s Farewell Address, a still-relevant warning against partisan politics and foreign entanglements.George Washington’s Farewell Address was a prophetic letter he wrote to his fellow citizens and signed from a “parting friend,” addressing the forces he feared could destroy our democracy: hyper-partisanship, excessive debt, and foreign wars. In it, Washington called for unity among “citizens by birth or choice,” advocated moderation, defended religious pluralism, proposed a foreign policy of independence (not isolation), and proposed that education is essential to democracy. He established the precedent for the peaceful transfer of power. Washington’s urgent message was adopted by Jefferson after years of opposition and quoted by Lincoln in defense of the Union. Woodrow Wilson invoked it for nation-building; Eisenhower for Cold War; Reagan for religion. Once celebrated as civic scripture, more widely reprinted than the Declaration of Independence, the Farewell Address is now almost forgotten. Yet its message remains starkly relevant today. In Washington’s Farewell, John Avlon offers a stunning portrait of our first president and his battle to save America from self-destruction. Washington’s Farewell “brings to light Washington’s goodbye by elucidating what it meant not only during the early days of the republic, but its lasting effect through the centuries” (Library Journal, starred review). Now the Farewell Address may inspire a new generation to re-center their politics and reunite our nation through the lessons rooted in Washington’s shared experience.

Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City


Nelson Johnson - 2002
    New Jersey Superior Court judge Nelson Johnson has been observing the underpinnings of the boardwalk scene for three decades, both as a professional and an amateur history buff. His scintillating new book traces the city's long, eventful path from birth to seaside resort to a scandal-ridden crime center and beyond. The Sopranos with salt-water taffy.

Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy Versus Jimmy Hoffa


James Neff - 2015
    From 1957 to 1964, Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa channeled nearly all of their considerable powers into destroying each other. Kennedy's battle with Hoffa burst into the public consciousness with the 1957 Senate Rackets Committee hearings and intensified when his brother named him attorney general in 1961. RFK put together a "Get Hoffa" squad within the Justice Department, devoted to destroying one man. But Hoffa, with nearly unlimited Teamster funds, was not about to roll over. Drawing upon a treasure trove of previously secret and undisclosed documents, James Neff has crafted a brilliant, heart-pounding epic of crime and punishment, a saga of venom and relentlessness and two men willing to do anything to demolish each other.

Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes 1963-64


Lyndon B. Johnson - 1997
    Johnson have been unsealed. They are examined in Michael R. Beschloss's Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964.The only president to record his private conversations from his first day in office, LBJ ordered the tapes to be locked in a vault until at least the year 2023. But that request has been preempted and the tapes unsealed, providing a close-up look at a president taking power in a way we have never seen before, beginning with John F. Kennedy's murder in November 1963 and continuing through Johnson's campaign for a landslide victory. In Taking Charge, Beschloss, whom Newsweek has called "America's leading presidential historian," has transcribed and annotated the secretly recorded tapes, providing historical commentary that allows us to understand fully the people, crises, and controversies that appear on them. Significant events and revelations chronicled in Taking Charge include the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, including Johnson's conversations with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover about the killing. Although he publicly endorsed the Warren Commission's lone-gunman findings, LBJ privately suspected that President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, probably backed by Fidel Castro. As early as the spring of 1964, while he prepared for possible military action in Southeast Asia, LBJ privately expressed doubts that the United States could ever win a land war in Vietnam. Johnson feared, after signing the Civil Rights Act, that blacks, inspired by Communists and the man he called "Muslim X" (Malcolm X), might riot and bring about a national white backlash against civil rights. The Johnson White House tapes provide us with an intimate look at Johnson's complex, changing relationships with Lady Bird and the rest of his family, Jacqueline Kennedy, ex-Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and members of the White House staff. Taking Charge is not only a unique exploration of a momentous presidency but also a highly personal look at the private man who took office after an American tragedy and led the nation into some of its most tumultuous years.

Thomas Paine's Rights of Man: A Biography


Christopher Hitchens - 2006
    Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution, Paine’s text is a passionate defense of man’s inalienable rights. Since its publication, Rights of Man has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted. But in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, the polemicist and commentator Christopher Hitchens, “at his characteristically incisive best,” marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness (The Times, London). Hitchens is a political descendant of the great pamphleteer, “a Tom Paine for our troubled times.” (The Independent, London) In this “engaging account of Paine’s life and times [that is] well worth reading” he demonstrates how Paine’s book forms the philosophical cornerstone of the United States, and how, “in a time when both rights and reason are under attack,” Thomas Paine’s life and writing “will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.” (New Statesman)

Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis


Robert F. Kennedy - 1968
    Kennedy. In this unique account, he describes each of the participants during the sometimes hour-to-hour negotiations, with particular attention to the actions and views of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. In a new foreword, the distinguished historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., discusses the book's enduring importance, and the significance of new information about the crisis that has come to light, especially from the Soviet Union.

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism


Susan Jacoby - 2004
    In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby traces more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected achievements of secularists who, allied with tolerant believers, have led the battle for reform in the past and today.Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, and the once-famous Robert Green Ingersoll, Freethinkers restores to history the passionate humanists who struggled against those who would undermine the combination of secular government and religious liberty that is the glory of the American system.

Best Evidence


David S. Lifton - 1980
    Kennedy's assassination. David Lifton's skilled analysis leads to one irrefutable conclusion: that the plot did not begin in the twisted mind of a lone assassin but was a successfully executed conspiracy that reached the highest level of the federal government. "Sometime during Kennedy's thousand days, a secret veto was cast on his presidency and his life."Lifton's obsession with unanswered questions has led him again and again to the "best evidence" - that the president's body fell into the hands of people who deceived the nation and the world and who, to this day, have not been brought to justice.

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties


Tom O'Neill - 2019
    What really happened in 1969? In 1999, when Tom O'Neill was assigned a magazine piece about the thirtieth anniversary of the Manson murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Weren't the facts indisputable? Charles Manson had ordered his teenage followers to commit seven brutal murders, and in his thrall, they'd gladly complied. But when O'Neill began reporting the story, he kept finding holes in the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's narrative, long enshrined in the best-selling Helter Skelter. Before long, O'Neill had questions about everything from the motive to the manhunt. Though he'd never considered himself a conspiracy theorist, the Manson murders swallowed the next two decades of his career. He was obsessed. Searching but never speculative, CHAOS follows O'Neill's twenty-year effort to rebut the "official" story behind Manson. Who were his real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties? Why didn't law enforcement act on their many chances to stop him? And how did he turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers? O'Neill's hunt for answers leads him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from the Summer of Love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with cover-ups and coincidences. Featuring hundreds of new interviews and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, CHAOS mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. In those two dark nights in Los Angeles, O'Neill finds the story of California in the sixties: when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia-or dystopia-was just an acid trip away.

Robert Kennedy: His Life


Evan Thomas - 2000
    . . saw suffering and tried to heal it." And "Bad Bobby," the ruthless and manipulative bully of countless conspiracy theories. Thomas's unvarnished but sympathetic and fair-minded portrayal is packed with new details about Kennedy's early life and his behind-the-scenes machinations, including new revelations about the 1960 and 1968 presidential campaigns, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his long struggles with J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson.