The End of Camelot....
I liked this book. The writing is fluid and smooth as the authors summarize the highlights of Jack Kennedy's life, beginning in 1943 when his PT-109 patrol torpedo boat gets rammed by a Japanese destroyer near the Solomon Islands. Jack was the skipper of the patrol boat and, after a faltering start, realizes he needs to take charge. He "tows a badly burned crew member by placing a strap from the man's life jacket between his own teeth and pulling him. During the five long hours it takes to reach the island, Kennedy swallows mouthful after mouthful of saltwater, yet his strength as a swimmer allows him to reach the beach....Days pass. Kennedy and his men survive by choking down live snails and licking moisture off leaves." After several days and nights during which Kennedy repeatedly swims out into the Pacific at night hoping to intercept another PT boat, he and his men are finally rescued by local islanders. It was a nightmarish odyssey from which Kennedy emerges a much stronger man than he had been.
The book also details highlights of Lee Harvey Oswald's rather pathetic life as a perpetually frustrated and unhappy man, a former Marine, who never achieves the recognition he craves. He defects to Russia, meets and marries Marina, but is still a person of little consequence in spite of his socialist beliefs and not accorded the stature he feels his due, so he decides to return to America. Because he had lived in Russia, he was on the radar of the FBI and was questioned but ultimately deemed not a threat. Was there a conspiracy? The authors only say that "The world will never know the answer." It seems to me that they think Oswald acted alone even though they don't state that explicitly.
Most of the information in this book is known but was presented anew for our review and pleasure. It is gossipy at times with tales of Marilyn Monroe, the Mafia, Frank Sinatra, the intense personal enmity between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Jackie's frolic aboard Aristotle Onassis' yacht, but there are also chapters on the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights movement, the death of Jack and Jackie's infant son, the days leading up to Dallas and the immediate aftermath.
"They load the body onto Air Force One through the same rear door John Kennedy stepped out of three hours earlier. That moment was ceremonial and presidential. This moment is morbid and ghastly."
Bill O'Reilly obviously is taken by the Kennedys and admires them and is fascinated by them as so many of us were.....and some still are.
"A generation after his assassination, more than four million people a year still arrive at Arlington to pay their respects to the fallen president. And also to the grand American Vision that he represented."
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