Customer Reviews

JFK: Breaking the News

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This is not just another JFK book. The author doesn't offer any conspiracy theories or apologies for investigations less than perfect. But what IS here is the most comprehensive book ever written about the people involved...from the Oswalds to the Rubys, the Warren Commission members, the cops, the Dallas kooks and the charlatans who have made a living out of fooling a saddened world.
This book is an amazing product of a journalist who has been in the front lines for 40 years -- covering every aspect of the case. It's the most human story every told about those 40 years and an honest search for the truth.
And though I thought there could be nothing new about the JFK case, I was surprised at how much really IS told for the first time here.

If you want the unvarnished truth of what REALLY occurred in Dallas that November weekend in 1963, as well as the astonishing true story of the assassination's aftermath, you'll find plainly-written, documented answers in Breaking The News. This is a personal, hard-hitting but even-handed treatment by the single most knowledgeable assassination expert there is, Hugh Aynesworth. Teamed once again with his old writing partner, Stephen Michaud (The Only Living Witness, etc.) Aynesworth not only sets the record straight, once and for all, (and totally vanquishes the hordes of conspiracy theorists in the process) but also unveils a long list of fascinating insider tidbits, such as the outrageous way that Melvin Belli hit on the epilepsy defense for Jack Ruby, and how Lee Harvey Oswald's widow, Mariana, briefly found comfort in the arms of another man. More significantly, he reports for the first time the FBI's lame excuse for not telling the Dallas Police Department that someone potentially dangerous as Oswald would enjoy a sniper's-eye seat to Kennedy's motorcade. It wasn't a plot, but sheer laziness and stupidity that made the assassination possible. The material on bizarre New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison alone is worth the cover price.
Historians, journalists, criminal justice experts and all other intelligent students of the assassination have been waiting decades for this book. Thank goodness that Aynesworth finally got around to writing it.

Hugh Aynesworth has done more first-hand investigative reporting on the JFK assassination than any reporter I know. He is also the only reporter who was in Dealey Plaza during the assassination, at the Texas Theater during the capture of Oswald, and in the police basement with us when Ruby shot Oswald. JFK: Breaking the News is a must-read for those who want to know the facts.

Hugh Aynesworth's "JFK: Breaking the News" is a fascinating eyewitness account to almost all of the principal events of the Kennedy assassination and its Dallas aftermath. While journalistic and easily readable, it also includes a first-person account of what it was like to cover the story as a reporter plus the intuitions and feelings a reporter often has about a story that don't explicitly make their way into the newspaper accounts. As a newspaper reporter myself, I feel I have a great model to which I can aspire in Mr. Aynesworth. Kudos.

This book is an emotional experience. You cannot read it without finding yourself back there in 1963 hearing about the shooting, re-living the cascade of events that followed. Hugh Aynesworth's and Stephen Michaud's direct reportorial style creates immediacy. Reading their pages, I was instantly back in the library at Duke law school, forcing myself through a civil procedure case book, when a ripple swept across the big reading room. The library practically emptied over the next few minutes as everyone sought a TV. As things went from bad to worse over the next 72 hours, I remember having a hunger for hard, specific details--as though to understand exactly what was happening might stop it, reverse it, erase it. The appetite for reliable details about the tragedy, oddly, has never gone away, and this excellently substantive book answers to it. It is a worthy addition to the national canon. It will help our kids understand why Kennedy's killing still moves and grieves us all so many years later.

Aynesworth tells us what it was like to be a young reporter covering the biggest story of his life. There are more comprehensive books on the JFK assassination, but Breaking the News is a great read and provides a crucial birds eye view of the events of Novemeber 1963. It is also an interesting look at how reporters did their work in the "old days" when typewriters and shoe leather were the reigning technologies.

Good to start with but i found towards the end it became conspiracy bashing.After all that has been found out about certain people in high places you would expect a newspaperman to err on the side of caution