VINCENT BUGLIOSI is an American master of common sense, a punishing advocate and a curmudgeonly refreshing voice of reason.
His targets have been the loopy and the deranged, the deceitful and the violent. And so, a career launched with the prosecution of Charles Manson and honed with a book parsing the defense of O.J. Simpson has, with seeming inevitability, come around to 20th century America's great repository of poor reasoning: the assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
After reading what may be Bugliosi's crowning work (more than 1,600 pages, not to mention an additional 1,100 pages of notes on an accompanying CD), one thinks: At last, someone has done it, put all the pieces together. "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" is important not just because it's correct, though it is. It's significant not just because it is comprehensive -- surely, no one will deny that. It is essential, first and foremost, because it is conclusive. From this point forward, no reasonable person can argue that Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent; no sane person can take seriously assertions that Kennedy was killed by the CIA, Fidel Castro, the Mob, the Soviets, the Vietnamese, Texas oilmen or his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson -- all of whom exist as suspects in the vacuous world of conspiracy theorists.
Each may be guilty of crimes, but none had anything to do with Kennedy's assassination. "Reclaiming History" may finally move those accusations beyond civilized debate.
Not everyone who dares to heft Bugliosi's tome will be happy with it. He is not an ingratiating writer; his tone, as always, is prosecutorial. He writes aggressively and sarcastically. There's not a lot of finesse on display. He's a slugger, not a stylist. Think Ruth, not Clemente.
Bugliosi, whose previous books include "The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President" (2001) and "No Island of Sanity: Paula Jones v. Bill Clinton" (1998), begins by re-creating the events of the assassination, describing the investigations into that terrible day and examining the evidence collected by the various police agencies, the FBI, the commission led by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and others. Bugliosi is a keen analyst of that material; his dissection of the medical evidence is particularly telling. He establishes that Oswald fired three shots from the window of the Texas School Book Depository. One missed; one hit Kennedy in the upper back, then passed through his body and pierced then-Texas Gov. John B. Connally; the third struck Kennedy in the back of the head, killing him.
