Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1986. Book Club Edition. Hardcover. Very good/Good. 24 cm. xiv, [2], 555, [5] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. Henry Hurt the investigative reporter published his book, Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1986. The book included an interview with Robert W. Easterling. In 1974 Easterling was committed to a mental institution. The following year he got in touch with the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his knowledge of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Although interviewed by the Secret Service several times between 1974 and 1982, Easterling felt his story was not being fully investigated. He therefore contacted Hurt. Robert W. Easterling told Hurt that he had been recruited by Manuel Rivera to drive Lee Harvey Oswald from Dallas on the day of the assassination. Easterling claimed that David Ferrie, Jack Ruby and Clay Shaw had been involved in this conspiracy. Easterling also told Hurt that Rivera had been the gunman who killed Kennedy. Rivera used a 7-mm Czech-made automatic rather than the Mannlicher-Carcano that had been planted in the Texas Book Depository to implicate Oswald. Easterling decided not to take part in this conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy and instead fled to Jackson, Mississippi. On 21st November, 1963, Easterling informed the FBI in Washington of the plot. He was told they knew of the conspiracy. The Kennedy assassination stands as one of the great mysteries of modern times. The earliest official investigation - the Report of the Warren Commission issued in 1964 - concluded that a lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, shot and killed President Kennedy. After a brief period of acceptance of this conclusion, public skepticism began to grow as people learned more about the Warren Commission's work. Fifteen years later it became politically expedient to reopen the assassination case in the form of a Congressional investigation. The House Select Committee on Assassinations came up with a new and startlingly different conclusion - that Kennedy probably died at the hands of conspirators. Astonishingly, in 1983, though 80 percent of Americans believed that JFK was killed by conspirators, 70 percent saw no reason to reopen the case to learn the truth. It is the openness and resiliency of the American system that has prevented the JFK case from being closed and stifled: a band of independent people - teachers, lawyers, housewives, doctors, scholars, photographers - would not swallow the official line, and have given years of their spare time and their personal resources to inch the case toward some plausible resolution. The assassination of John F. Kennedy set into motion a pervasive transfer of power, one that shifted the basic thrusts of American policy. If the purpose of the assassination was to bring about such profound changes, then his killing was a shattering success. Indeed, the political impact of his death is why the question of his assassination is as important today as it was years ago. If the atrocity was indeed the result of a conspiracy, then the country and the government remain threatened by a cunning, invisible enemy as politically potent as the most menacing superpower. Reasonable Doubt is the most thorough, objective, well-documented study of the Kennedy assassination that has ever been done. The author, with a research team, spent several years sifting and analyzing mountains of data, following every lead, cross-checking and corroborating every fact from at least two sources, and interviewing hundreds of people involved with and knowledgeable about the case. The result is a work that is riveting, authoritative, and utterly convincing - a massive synthesis that doubtless sheds as much light on the awful tragedy in Dallas as we will ever have.