Book review: Grievances undiminished by time

The house select committee on assassinations found that, although Lee Harvey Oswald fired the deadly shots, he was not the only gunman

Surrounded by detectives, Lee Harvey Oswald talks to the media as he is led down a corridor of the Dallas police station on November 23, 1963, for another round of questioning in connection with the assassination of US president John F Kennedy. File picture: AP

• That Day in Dallas: Lee Harvey Oswald Did NOT Kill JFK 
• Robert K Tanenbaum 
• Regnery, £23.99

Wherever you land on the question of who assassinated John F Kennedy — and recent surveys show that a majority of Americans don’t buy the official line of Lee Oswald’s guilt (I tend to agree with them) — the events of those 60 hours between the Kennedys’ arrival at Love Field airport and when Oswald himself was killed, are mind-boggling in their sheer oddness.

Not just what happened in Dealey Plaza, but also the murder of police officer JD Tippitt; the character and behaviour of Jack Ruby; the tragic but surreal goings-on at Parkland Hospital. 

It is as if the city of Dallas entered and exited a two-day period in which the possibility of anything resembling a rationally analysable course of events was suspended.

David Lynch at his most hallucinatory might not have been able to assemble what unfolded. 

Indeed, I wonder sometimes whether the assassination was the doorway by which Lynchian-style fantasy was able to enter the American imagination.

Another truism about the assassination is that it still arouses extraordinary interest and passion. 

Robert K Tanebaum, author of That Day in Dallas: Lee Harvey Oswald Did NOT Kill JFK, is someone who has lived at the very heart of that storm. 

In 1977, he was appointed deputy chief counsel to the house select committee on assassinations, the HSCA, which re-examined the deaths of Martin Luther King and Kennedy. 

The committee’s eventual finding concerning JFK was that there probably was a conspiracy; and that, although Oswald fired the deadly shots, he was not the only gunman.

In key respects, this refuted the earlier Warren Commission, which had concluded that Oswald had acted alone. But this still had the feel of a political fudge, one of those compromises that ends up satisfying no-one.

Fudge and compromise are of no interest to Robert Tanenbaum. He believed that the committee was corrupt; it had refused to follow where the “immutable evidence” that clearly led; namely, that the president was killed by a shot from the front (and not from the Texas School Book Depository behind him, where Oswald was) and the CIA were involved. Tannenbaum resigned his position in disgust.

That Day in Dallas is less a thorough analysis of the assassination than an apologia pro vita sua, as Tenenbaum digs up the roots of his “uncompromisable” dedication to the truth, roots that are both personal and professional, and even spiritual; he sees signs of divine direction at the key turning points in his life. 

In particular, he identifies people placed in his path who inculcated him with his deeply held set of values, including Frank S Hogan, legendary district attorney of New York for 32 years and the son of poor, hardworking Irish immigrants.

The dealings of the HSCA cause Tanenbaum to fulminate with a sense of rage, grievance, and dismay that is undiminished with the passage of nearly 50 years. 

His book reads like the transcript of a man in full flow of passionate speech, rather than the carefully drafted reflections of a man seated at his writing desk; a man who has been immersed in this case for so long, he doesn’t realise the number of assumptions he is making about what readers will already know if they are curious about the assassination but haven’t given it any special study.

So while this is a good book with which to peer into a lawyer’s soul and to gauge the feelings stirred by the events of November 22, 1963, and what came next, it doesn’t work as a usable guide to events. 

For this, readers should turn to a researcher praised and thanked by Tanenbaum: Josiah Thompson and his magnum opus, Last Second in Dallas.

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