Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot [Hardcover]

Bill O'Reilly (Author), Martin Dugard (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 2, 2012

A riveting historical narrative of the shocking events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the follow-up to mega-bestselling author Bill O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln.

More than a million readers have thrilled to Bill O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln, the page-turning work of nonfiction about the shocking assassination that changed the course of American history. Now the anchor of The O'Reilly Factor; recounts in gripping detail the brutal murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy--and how a sequence of gunshots on a Dallas afternoon not only killed a beloved president but also sent the nation into the cataclysmic division of the Vietnam War and its culture-changing aftermath.

In January 1961, as the Cold War escalates, John F. Kennedy struggles to contain the growth of Communism while he learns the hardships, solitude, and temptations of what it means to be president of the United States. Along the way he acquires a number of formidable enemies, among them Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and Alan Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In addition, powerful elements of organized crime have begun to talk about targeting the president and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

In the midst of a 1963 campaign trip to Texas, Kennedy is gunned down by an erratic young drifter named Lee Harvey Oswald. The former Marine Corps sharpshooter escapes the scene, only to be caught and shot dead while in police custody.

The events leading up to the most notorious crime of the twentieth century are almost as shocking as the assassination itself. Killing Kennedy chronicles both the heroism and deceit of Camelot, bringing history to life in ways that will profoundly move the reader. This may well be the most talked about book of the year.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Immersively written . . .  Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Dugard succeed in investing a familiar national tragedy with fresh anguish. . . A powerful historical précis." —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"All the suspense and drama of a popular thriller."—Husna Haq, The Christian Science Monitor

About the Author

Bill O'Reilly is the anchor of The O'Reilly Factor, the highest-rated cable news show in the country. He also writes a syndicated newspaper column and is the author of several number-one bestselling books.

Martin Dugard is the New York Times bestselling author of several books of history. His book Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone has been adapted into a History Channel special. He lives in Southern California with his wife and three sons.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (October 2, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805096668
• ISBN-13: 978-0805096668
• ASIN: 0805096663
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.3 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4,217 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #185 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #2 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > True Accounts > Murder & Mayhem
  • #2 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( K ) > Kennedy, John F.
  • #2 in Books > History > Asia > Vietnam

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1,837 of 2,311 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars SORRY BILL October 15, 2012

By Larry Mullins

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I was working in downtown Washington, D.C. on November 22,1963, the day John F. Kennedy was killed. A few days later, I stood at Pennsylvania Avenue in bright November sunshine and watched an unforgettable funeral procession. A team of white horses pulled a two wheeled artillery cart carrying JKF's flag-draped casket, followed by a black, saddled but riderless horse. Boots, placed reversed, were in the stirrups. An unhurried, muffled drumbeat accompanied the inexpressible sensation of grief that pervaded the cool air. There was collective anguish for the man, of course, but also grief because it seemed our country would never be the same. What I am about to write is not a political rant. Rather, it concerns the ever-lengthening shadow that continues to be cast to this day by the unthinkable events of November 22, 1963.

I still have a copy of the Life magazine that came out just a few days after the assassination. An article in Life stated that the President had turned toward the School Book Depository, which explained the entrance wound that the Parkland doctors had discovered in his throat. Later this was corrected by the FBI, and we were told the Texas doctors were wrong about the entrance wound, it was an exit wound. By December 3rd a story was "leaked" to the press stating that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had already determined that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. This information seemed to calm the distraught nation. Almost a year later, the Warren Commission Report was published. It was hailed by the mainstream media with virtually universal praise, although its supporting 26 volumes of evidence (with a supplementary FBI report) would not be published for another two months. I believe I am one of the very few people who ever read the 888 page Warren Commission Report....

The Warren Commission Report reassured Americans that there was no conspiracy, and that Jack Ruby, who had murdered Oswald, was also a lone assassin and in no way connected to organized crime. After reading the report, I explained to people how the first assassination bullet missed, how the second bullet hit Kennedy in the back, exited from his throat, and traveled on to wound Governor Connally, and how the third bullet inflicted the final fatal head wound.

But new books began to emerge from credible researchers who reported that much of the evidence in the Commission's 26 volumes of documentation is dramatically contrary to its own findings. Clearly the Warren Commission had gone to extreme measures to ignore Jack Ruby's organized crime connections. Even more disturbing, it was equally apparent that not one witness to the assassination testified that the event had taken place the way the Warren Commission described it. Not one. Especially not John and Nellie Connally. (Both of whom testified under oath that they were absolutely convinced that JFK was hit a moment before Governor Connally, and by a different shot. If this is true, there had to be at least two assassins.) Not Zapruder, who filmed the tragedy and testified (along with scores of witnesses) that a shot definitely came from the grassy knoll. Evidence accumulated, and there was a steady decline in the credibility of the Warren Commission Report between 1964 and 1976. Lyndon Johnson disowned it before he died. Driven by public entreaties, there was a new congressional inquiry, 1976 - 1978, called the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

The new governmental investigation managed to take a baby step toward reality. It determined that there had been a conspiracy that involved at least two shooters (one from the grassy knoll) and was probably orchestrated by organized crime. However, the government still could not tell us what happened, nor who was involved, and it still generally supported most of the incongruous conclusions of the Warren Commission Report. In 1993, the late Gaeton Fonzi, who spent three years as an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, lamented the failure in his book, The Last Investigation. Historians consider Fonzi's book among the preeminent and most scholarly of the six hundred or so that have been published on the Kennedy assassination. He wrote:

"Despite the clamor of the last few years, all the books, the films and the articles, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is being allowed to go quietly into history. We must not let that happen-not yet, not ever ... The conspiracy to kill the President of the United States was a conspiracy against the democratic system-and thus a conspiracy against each and every one of us ... The Government has failed us. It is outrageous that in a democratic society, after two official investigations, our Government still tells us it doesn't know what happened."

I looked forward to Bill O'Reilly's new book. At last someone would shift through the morass of information and distill a reasonable, no-spin presentation about what really happened on that catastrophic day in 1963. I was certain O'Reilly would dare to open the forbidden doors. However, much as I like Bill O'Reilly, his book is mostly a sad rework of timeworn material. He finally gets around to addressing the assassination by page 245. In his final 50 pages the legendary "no-spin" man embraces the most flagrant spin-job in American history, the Warren Commission Report. How could O'Reilly examine the assassination without scrutinizing the Commission's own published documentation and the FBI supplemental report? In them the autopsy drawings by Dr. James Humes and FBI agent James Sibert both illustrate the back wound of JFK as lower than the supposed throat exit wound. Or how could O'Reilly ignore information in the FBI report by agents Sibert and O'Neil (who were present at the autopsy) that stated Dr. Humes probed the back wound and determined the bullet had entered at a trajectory of "45 to 60 degrees" and had penetrated less than the length of his finger? Or the testimony of Secret Service agent Glen Bennett who saw the bullet strike Kennedy "about four inches down from the right shoulder"? Or the testimony of Secret Service agent Clinton Hill who examined Kennedy's body in the morgue and again described a back wound that could not possibly have exited from the President's throat because it was "about six inches below the neckline and to the right hand-side of the spinal column"?

O'Reilly and his coauthor played it safe and wrote a book that pretends the research and investigations between 1964 and 2012 simply never happened. Beyond this, what they did write about is rife with all the errors, assumptions, and grievously incompetent conclusions of the Warren Commission Report. If Mr. O'Reilly's book had been submitted to a publisher by a non-celebrity, it would have been tossed in five minutes. "Killing Kennedy" is a colossal disappointment. Worse, it endangers the truth by assisting its submergence into fabricated history. "Killing Kennedy" is a disservice to the "folks" Mr. O'Reilly is supposed to be looking out for. Save your money. Or invest it in one of the more acclaimed books on the Kennedy assassination, such as The Last Investigation by Gaeton Fonzi.

LARRY MULLINS Read more ›

666 of 856 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Losing time, wasting money October 19, 2012

By JM

Format:Hardcover

The corner stone of this book is this: Kennedy was killed by Oswald. End of story.

How does O'Reilly know? Because he read the Warren Report.

Fine. For a lone killer to have fired only three shots in the imparted six seconds, the Commission had to create the single-bullet theory: one bullet, seven wounds, two broken bones, one right turn, one left turn... So magic that the bullet is found in pristine condition on a stretcher. Are you ready to believe that? Well, in September 1964, two men were not.

One of the seven Warren Commisison members, Senator Richard Russell had this (recorded) conversation with his good buddy, President Lyndon Johnson:

RUSSELL: - The commission believes that the same bullet that hit Kennedy hit Connally. Well, I don't believe it.
JOHNSON: - I don't either.

Now,
- If you want to know how the story was concocted, you might want to read : Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why.

- If you want some perspective on who killed Kennedy and why, you might want to read : JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

- If you need a good dissection of the Warren Report, you could turn to : Accessories After the Fact (1967) or Biting the Elephant: The Warren Report (2009)....

- If you don't mind a little file chasing, you might want to venture into : Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK

- If you want to know how does a well-sourced book looks like, you should read : Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case (Second Edition)

One book remains to be written, though. I will be more than happy to contribute title and subtitle:

BLINDING AMERICA
The 1963-2013 propaganda campaign to keep Americans in the dark following the assassination of President Kennedy. Read more ›

351 of 450 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars O'Reilly has lost all credibility. November 6, 2012

By Kevin

Format:Hardcover

Having an email read by Bill on his show last August regarding how I was looking forward to this book so that someone would finally set the record straight for America, I was astonished by the complete lack of research that went into this drivel. It's a gossip-driven piece about JFK's womanizing, Jackie's smoking habit, and a cop-out to the erroneous pile of lies that constitute the 1964 Warren Commission Report (WC).

1. Bill and his cowriter make no mention of the Church Report, the findings of Jim Garrison's investigation, the House Select Committee on Assassinations(HSCA), or the final investigation in 1994-98, the Assassination Record Review Board (ARRB), all of which found increasingly more evidence than each previous investigation,of the widespread FBI/CIA-led plot to kill the President and cover it up.

2. This book contains no eyewitness accounts vs their edited versions in the WC report, no details regarding the conflicts between the real-time TV reporting and later omissions/deletions by the WC. For example, the first rifle found in the TSBD was easily identified by the police on site, and immediately reported on TV, as a 7.65mm German Mauser. Only later was the 6.5mm Mannlicher found "hidden" among boxes near the east "sniper's nest". Subsequently, the Mauser finding is disregarded by Dallas police chief.

3. No real studies on the inability to actually fire the Mannlicher as it would have to have been fired from that window, angle, tree, etc? Bolt action MC action has never been repeated by the most expert marksmen (please post a study that shows that someone actually repeated Oswald's "feat".)

4. Rehash the Magic Bullet theory? A bullet that caused multiple injuries to two men, but is found in pristine condition on the stretcher at Parkland?... You mention Malcolm Perry perfoming a tracheotomy, but you are perhaps the first author to forget to mention the wound in JFK's neck, which Perry characterized as an ENTRY wound! No discussion on a trained trauma surgeon's initial take n the head wounds? And then you mistakenly try to align the wounds with your multiple viewings of the Zapruder film by stating on page 268 the bullet "exits the front of his skull." Then how did his brain splatter backward onto the car where Jackie tried to retrieve it? How inconvenient, Mr. O'Reilly. You have now painted yourself into quite a messy corner of misinformation and physical impossibilty. And what "version" of the Zapruder film were you watching? There are many versions circulating...

5. This list could go on for pages, but answer this, Bill - you said on Fox & Friends that you and Dugard "found no credible evidence of a conspiracy" yet I went on YouTube and found a cub reporter in 1989 doing a piece on "the CIA's Involvement in the JFK Assassination". Who's the cub reporter? Bill O'Reilly. Did you forget that you had previously investigated this same issue? You include an appendix that puts you at the door when DeMorhenshildt commits suicide at his daughter's house before his scheduled testimony for the HSCA - did you report your presence to police as a witness? Or are you spinning this a bit?

You could have followed that up with a piece about the Masonic involvement in the cast of characters, including Chief Justice Earl Warren, LBJ's oilmen in Dallas, LBJ's "best friend" and neighbor J. Edgar Hoover, and on and on.

6. The FOIA led to the release over 100,000 documents on this crime after JFK the movie came out in 1991, after you did your piece on the CIA's involvement 2 years earlier. Now there's over 1,000,000 more documents to review, and the multi-volume ARRB report from 1998 - are you aware of any of this information? You did NO research at all for this book, did you, Bill? No mention of Permindex? No mention of the New Orleans connection to David Ferrie, Mob boss Carlos Marcello, or Guy Bannister? No mention of Jack Ruby's long connection for Marcello and the CIA running guns into Cuba, training anti-Castro Cubans? Rose Cheramie? Fletcher Prouty of the CIA? Clay Shaw, Board member of Permindex, the only person ever put on trial for the assassination, by Jim Garrison? You ignored an entire trial?

7. How about this - on his deathbed, Watergate mastermind and CIA superspy E. Howard Hunt confessed that he was asked to participate in the planning and execution of the plot to kill Kennedy, but he declined. He also drew a crude flowchart of the chain of command for the plotters. You can Google it, but I'll save you the effort: From the top down, he wrote "LBJ - Cord Meyer (CIA) - Bill Harvey/David Sanchez Morales (2 CIA "hitters") - French gunman on Grassy Knoll (a hired Corsican Assassin named Jean Soutre (aka Michel Roux). Again, no mention of CIA agent Fletcher Prouty's epic expose?

8. O'Reilly also said on Fox & Friends that the one character he couldn't figure out was George de Mohrenshildt, Oswald's handler in Dallas. You claimed, as I said earlier, to have been on the doorstep when he killed himself? There are many sources of information on deMorhenschlidt - how did you not find anything on him in your "research"? Call me, I'll fill you in!

9. No information found regarding the many false sightings of "Oswald" in and around Dallas, at the same time he was supposed to be in Mexico City, trying to get papers to travel to Cuba? No research on the CIA's funloving habit of running "doubles" as covers for different scenarios? You mention an incident at the rifle range, but no discussion on the conflict here. What about the car lots, etc. drawing attention to himself in the 2 weeks prior to the assassination? If LHO was in Dallas making a fool of himself, then who was in Mexico City?

10. Bill, you and Dugard didn't really do your homework here. Tippitt's killer? There were witnesses - where's their story of two men, one dark/Latino, possibly Cuban? Who told the military to "stand down" for JFK's parade route? Who told Dallas police to stand down in Dealey Plaza?

You mention the parade route violated multiple rules regarding motorcade safety, but who was responsible? Someone had to agree to use that route - Police Chief Curry had that responsibility as well as coordinate it with Secret Service. Why were the motocycles not flanking the car? JFK never had any problem with his security, so it was NOT he who told them to stay back so he could be closer to the crowd.

Sadly, Mr. O'Reilly, in fairness, I think that you wrote a puff piece just to capitalize on the success of Killing Lincoln, which is a very well done piece of work. Of course, it's much easier to write about a subject where there is no real controversy - we all know what happened to Lincoln, but the details of his struggles filled the pages nicely and created a vivid chronicle of the difficulties he faced.

Your decision to take on the most controversial crime in the history of America was ill-advised and deserved much better treatment - better you had just stopped your story on November 21, 1963, and left it as a titllating memoir of juicy tidbits rather than ruin your credibility by proceeding into the Masonic Shrine that is Dealey Plaza. (You probably didn't catch that, either...)

If anyone reads this review, I would recommend, as other reviews have, that you look elsewhere for real research, critical analysis and make the effort to honor the 50 years of research that has been done to uncover the people involved and their motives. This book is devoid of any real detective work. Sorry Bill, but you really missed an opportunity to serve your country had you done this with real intent and purpose.

Stick with yelling at your Liberal guests on your talk show every nite. You're much better at that than history, despite being a former teacher.

And that, Sir, is fair and balanced. Read more ›