30-04-2009, 08:57 PM
Paul Rigby Wrote:Encounter, June 1964, pp. 73-74, 76 & 78
Books & Writers: Whodunnit
By Goronwy Rees
Who Killed Kennedy? By Thomas G. Buchanan. Secker and Warburg, 18s.
Mr. Buchanan has no difficulty in showing that the assassins of the three Presidents were in no ordinary, or medical, or legal sense mad; in the case of the two of them who were brought to trial, the courts held that they were responsible for their acts. He also shows that they all had definite political motives, however eccentric or mistaken; that John Wilkes Booth certainly was the centre of a widespread plot, even though we still do not quite understand all its ramifications
Allen Dulles wanted to place a copy of Robert J. Donovan's The Assassins (London: Elek Books Ltd., 1956) in the hands of his fellow-commissioners. Those more concerned with the truth recalled Eisenschiml's remarkable work of twenty years before:
Quote:Times Literary Supplement, 14 May 1964, p.407
American Assassins
Anonymous
THOMAS G. BUCHANAN: Who Killed Kennedy? 192pp. Secker & Warburg. 18s.
The jacket of this odd book asserts its author’s thesis that “a vital clue to Kennedy’s murder…is to be found in previous attempts against American Presidents from Lincoln onwards.” This thesis justifies the devotion of a great part of a short book to the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. This space is wasted, since Mr. Buchanan is a remarkably bad historian. Thus he seems to accept the view that the Confederate government was involved in John Wilkes Booth’s crime. He must be the only believer in this slander alive today. It is revealing that his only source is the highly partisan life of Lincoln written by his secretaries, Nicolay and Hay (the two authors are run into one and become Nicolay Hay). There is no discussion of the role of Stanton, central to the problem, although there has recently been published an admirable new life of Stanton by Mr. Thomas and Mr. Hyman. But there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of Lincoln (no one, despite the blurb, ever doubted this). There was no conspiracy behind the murder of Garfield despite Mr. Buchanan’s attempt to drag in Roscoe Conkling. Characteristically, Conkling is twice accused of personal corruption. Conkling was deeply unpopular, tolerant of graft, involved in a public-private sexual scandal, but he was never accused of personal corruption. He was not Blaine. Even Buchanan finds it hard to dig up a conspiratorial origin for McKinley’s murder and he ignores the “strange case of Ambrose Bierce and William Randolph Hearst.”
Mr. Buchanan, in addition to being a very bad historian, is not well informed about political assassinations in general. He seems to think that the only assassins of public figures, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, were anarchists of the Bakunin school. Was Lenin’s brother of this school, or the group that removed Alexander II? He asserts, dogmatically, that Marxists and Communists do not go in for assassinations. This may be true in general. But Mr. Buchanan might look at the story of the bomb outrage in Sofia Cathedral – or at the murder of Trotsky.
When Mr. Buchanan gets away from bad history and turns his attention to Dallas, he does rather better. He has no difficulty in showing that the Dallas police were fantastically incompetent – or worse. Mr. Buchanan thinks they were worse, that they were accomplices in a great crime and that they are busy covering up their tracks now. By a method rather like that of the construction of an “identi-kit,” Mr. Buchanan describes “Mr. X,” the brain behind the crime. He is a Texas “gambler” i.e., an oilman “wheeler and dealer.” Kennedy was removed because he might do a deal with Russia and because he might tamper with the sacred tax depletion allowance. Signor Mattei of the Italian oil monopoly, it is strongly suggested, was also murdered to protect American oil interests. Some of the examination of the police story is useful. But Mr. Buchanan overplays his hand. We shall be better advised to see what the Warren Committee reports and what the Attorney-General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, does. Meantime, Mr. Buchanan might do worse than look at Dr. Otto Eisenschiml’s Why Was Lincoln Murdered? It is an amateur’s book. Dr. Eisenschiml is a chemist while Mr. Buchanan is a manager of computers in Paris (France). But although it is hard to believe Dr. Eisenschiml’s thesis, his book is a tour de force. Mr. Buchanan’s book merely darkens counsel.