Conspiracy
Anthony Summers, 1980
McGraw Hill
640 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780070623927
Summary
One of the great all-time mystery stories, Conspiracy is the unsolved story of who killed President John F. Kennedy—and it is not a work of fiction.
Conspiracy attempts to prove what many have believed all along—that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone gunman.
Summers' book dovetailed with the work of the Congress Assassinations Committee. The CAC had just published its own 1,000-page report, which presented striking evidence of a joint plot—by the mafia and Cuban extremists—to kill Kennedy.
Like a crime writer follwing his craft, Summers lays out the empirical evidence used to convict Oswald in the public's mind. As the author shows, little of it stands up to scrutiny, especially when subjected to technology unavailable in 1963.
The author next traces the complex web of Oswald's connections with a host of strange and shadowy characters, all of whom were connected, in one way or another, to the FBI, CIA, or—most prominently—to fringe elements of those agencies. The latter were individuals working with Cubans and the mafia to overthrow Fidel Castro. And all detested Kennedy.
More terrifying by far, as Summers shows, both mafia and Cuban militants were the two groups who had "the motive, means, and opportunity to kill the president." All they needed was a "lone crazy." Someone like Oswald.
This is a thoroughly researched and intelligent examination of the Kennedy assassination. It's hard to ignore the frightening implications of Summer's work: that the true story of the assassination of President Kennedy on that fateful day in Dallas has never been disclosed, even after 50 years. (From LitLovers.)