he eminence of its members and the authoritative appearance of its Report have caused nearly universal acceptance of the conclusions of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, commonly known as the Warren Commission. On the other hand, among the minority who refuse to believe that the case is closed, many adhere to the view that the Commission, acting consciously, conspired to stifle the truth. This disturbing book espouses neither of these positions.

Mr. Epstein, a young scholar, began this book with the intention of writing a case study of the nature and activity of an extraordinary government commission. He has accomplished this task brilliantly. But in the course of interviewing nearly all the members of the Commission, and many members of its staff, he discovered that the official version of the Kennedy assassination fails to contend with serious contradictions presented by the evidence. Inquest clearly traces the process by which this official story came into being; it does not indulge in theoretical speculation about a deliberate suppression of crucial evidence. Mr. Epstein instead proposes an explanation based on the concept of “political truth”: the Commission, sincerely convinced that the national interest would best be served by the termination of rumors, and predisposed by its make-up and by the pressure of time not to search more deeply, failed to answer some of the essential questions about the tragedy.

Inquest includes hitherto unpublished government documents and illustrations. Although the author’s revelations are startling, he nowhere makes unsupported claims; his style is cool and objective. A sober, new view of the way the Commission dealt with the central event of our recent history, this book is destined to induce widespread discussion and debate.

“The murder of President John F. Kennedy affected each of us in some fashion. My own response was both personal and professional; personal because then-Senator Kennedy had been so kind to me in my first campaign for public office; professional, because I had served as defense council in many trials. I was aware that trial by press, preceding a well publicized case, often made a fair trial impossible. A concept of instant guilt grew around Lee Harvey Oswald as various media simultaneously broadcast the claims of the Dallas police that Oswald was the ‘lone assassin.’

“After Oswald’s death at the hands of Jack Ruby, the district attorney presented the evidence which he said proved Oswald’s guilt beyond any doubt. I read the text of his proof in the New York Times. It left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction for it seemed to contain grave and inexplicable contradictions. I said so in an article which I wrote not long afterwards.

“In December 1963, I received a telephone call from Marguerite Oswald. She said she had read the article I had written. ‘I know that you don’t say that my son was innocent but you do say that there is doubt and that he is entitled to be presumed innocent until he has had a trial. Well then I ask you now, will you be my son’s lawyer before the Warren Commission?’

“I accepted and thus began an investigation that has continued for more than two and one half years. I have read the Report of the Commission, the twenty-six volumes of testimony upon which it was presumably based, and the material that has been made available in the National Archives. I have traveled to Dallas seven times. I have interviewed witnesses on film and tape from Dallas to Maine. The force of the evidence is inescapable—the case against Oswald as the lone assassin is refuted by the very witnesses upon whom the Commission relied. The FBI Report devastates the Commission’s conclusions that all of the shots were fired from the rear and that they were fired by a lone assassin.

“In a book published by a member of the Warren Commission, the author stated: ‘Let those who scoff at the report bury themselves for ten months in the monumental record. After that, if they persist in their skepticism, that’s their privilege. May they add to the truth so long as it is the truth and not mere speculation.’

“For far more than ten months I have studied the body of evidence in this case. I have no theories as to who killed the President or as to why it was done. This book, then, is, in a sense, a response to the invitation tendered by Congressman Ford.”

The photograph at the left—a Polaroid snapshot published here for the first time—shows the presidential car turning onto Houston Street, toward the Book Depository building, moments before the first shot was fired from the sixth-floor window. Six seconds elapsed between that first shot and the last. Below is a photograph taken just after the last shot. In the few seconds between these pictures, history was changed and controversy was born …

What Really Happened in Dealey Plaza?

On that bright November day, as the presidential motorcade turned onto Elm Street and swung past the throngs of waving people with their clicking and whirring cameras, a six-second fusillade of shots ended a life—and started a controversy that has raged for four years.

How many shots were fired? From where? What wounds were inflicted, and how? What did the witnesses see and hear? What did the doctors really find? And, most crucial of all, what did the many cameras record?

In its case against Lee Harvey Oswald the Warren Commission presented its version of those six seconds in Dallas—a version fraught with error and contradiction and vulnerable to the many attacks that followed it.

For Josiah Thompson, a young philosophy professor, these errors and attacks left open the vital question: If the Commission’s version was untrue to the known facts, then what was the truth? Could one go back to that moment on Elm Street and start anew, using the testimony of the witnesses, the medical evidence, and the amazingly plentiful (yet insufficiently examined) on-the-spot photographs as a basis for a rigorous, scientific reconstruction of the events?

Thompson accepted the challenge. Working at first alone and later as a member of the Life magazine team investigating the assassination, he traveled time after time to Dallas to interview witnesses and doctors and spent endless hours, in the New York offices of Life and in the National Archives in Washington, subjecting the hundreds of photographs and amateur motion picture frames to careful microanalysis and measurement.

And it was from these visual records—the movies of Zapruder, Nix, Muchmore, Hughes and Bell, the photographs of Moorman, Willis, Altgens, Murray, Weaver and others—that the truth began to emerge … a truth perhaps more shocking than anything you have ever read.

In these pages you will examine these on-the-spot photographs, many published here for the first time; you will hear the testimony of witnesses, many ignored by the Warren Commission and you will re-examine the medical evidence through the eyes of the nation’s leading forensic pathologists.

And you will be led, step by step through a unique construction of those fateful seconds that changed history. There have been many books about the assassination, some based on sheer speculation. This book is based on hard evidence and provable fact—yet what it reveals is more shocking than the wildest speculation.

No sensible discussion of who killed Kennedy is now possible without taking into account After the Assassination. With brilliance and precision John Sparrow—of All Souls College, Oxford University—affirms that Oswald, and Oswald alone killed the President.

The lucid mind of a noted scholar—a “literary detective”—is here brought to bear on President Kennedy’s assassination: more specifically, on the flood of books and articles about the assassination. Incisively and dispassionately the author presents his conclusions concerning each of the “conspiracy” theories and why he believes them to be wrong.

This is a book that comes at exactly the right time—a time when his cool common sense is needed for this dialogue of our time. On a matter that has generated more heat than light, John Sparrow’s cool judgment offers the best illumination of the subject to date.

A Citizen’s Dissent, Mark Lane, author of Rush to Judgment, the provocative critique of the Warren Report, gives an alarming account of how “the American media act when a matter of historic dimensions occurs and when the government takes the very firm position that that which is demonstrably false is true.” The book is an explosive summation of Lane’s efforts to bring his dissenting opinions before the American public and of the incredible difficulties he encountered in questioning the official view of President Kennedy’s assassination.

“If we cannot trust the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and Earl Warren, God help us,” declared Melvin Belli during one of his debates with Lane. Lane is inclined to believe that we may well need God’s help—not only to discover the truth of the President’s murder, but also to maintain our rights to free speech and a free press. Determined to speak out about the tragedy during the two years of “great silence” immediately following the assassination, Lane tells of the obstacles he had to overcome to publish his controversial ideas, to appear on radio and television to talk about them, and even to find someone to publish a book that eventually became a nationwide number one best seller—Rush to Judgment.

He describes the mysteriously canceled debates on “personality” shows, the frustrations of “staged debates,” and the “debates which never occurred,” such as the one with Melvin Belli, covered by vast arrays of reporters in New York and not reported in any newspaper. Lane also gives a fascinating account of the personal harassment he underwent, typified by the disturbing “tails” of F.B.I. men and by one midwestern congressman who, in order to avoid a confrontation with Lane, accused him of “heinous crimes.” Here, too, are the stories of the men courageous enough to let him speak out, men like Barry Gray in New York and Mort Sahl on the West Coast.

In challenging the Warren Commission Report and its theory of the lone assassin, Lane was confronted first with indifference and then massive opposition on the part of almost the entire vast communications industry of America, the newspapers, the news magazines, and the major television networks.

The ever growing numbers of Americans who now disbelieve the validity of the Warren Report may well be echoing the questions Lane asks in A Citizen’s Dissent: Are we afraid of troublesome questions? Are the implications that flow from the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy better ignored? What is it that paralyzes the thought processes of men who are charged with public responsibility? A Citizen’s Dissent is the startling record of a man who has raised these questions and who demands convincing answers to them now, while there is still time to preserve the integrity of a free society.