Customer Reviews

Say Goodbye to America: The Sensational and Untold Story Behind the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

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Matthew Smith clearly has a good heart and a thankfully straightforward prose style, accentuated by his mercifully short chapters which get right to the point without bogging down in unnecessary detail.
Unfortunately, his book will disappoint all but those few readers who don't already know the basics of JFK assassination conspiracy theory.
Smith posits a none-too-original theory about Lee Harvey Oswald's mysterious trip to Mexico two months before the president's killing and he expresses ideas about Jack Ruby that could only come from a non-American unfamiliar with the 1960s' dominance of the Mafia in major U.S. cities. The author lists Mary and Ray LaFontaine's excellent "Oswald Talked" in his bibliography, but makes no mention of its major revelations including the fact that Ruby AND Oswald were involved in a major arms heist from nearby Fort Terrell earlier in November 1963.
Smith presents rehashed and hackneyed analyses of oft-surveyed assassination details such as the botched autopsy, the shooting of Officer Tippit, the suspicious deaths of many witnesses, the "pot shot" at Gen. Edwin Walker and the Garrison probe.
With the help of a European computer graphic wizard, Smith prints several pages of Dealey Plaza "3-dimensional" drawings purportedly proving that shots originated from the Grassy Knoll. There's no doubt they did -- all we have to do is watch Zapruder's film and read the testimony of more than four dozen witnesses who were there that day, including Jackie Kennedy who had to crawl on the BACK of the Lincoln to retrieve part of her husband's head -- but Smith's computer graphics and accompanying text are simply dizzying.
Perhaps Smith's most eye-opening, most harrowing story is told by airplane mechanic Hank Gordon, who recalls working at Red Bird airfield in Dallas that awful Friday afternoon, and how Kennedy's murder had been brazenly predicted by a Cuban military pilot there.
The best thing in Smith's book by far is the Foreward by Jim Marrs (author of Crossfire and Rule by Secrecy, both highly recommended). The longtime JFK researcher aptly scolds U.S. citizens, and especially its corporate-controlled media, for letting the murder of our president go uninvestigated, unsolved and unpunished. George H. W. Bush was in Houston on Nov. 22, 1963 (See Bruce Adamson's "1,000 Points of Light") and he alerted the FBI to some suspicious character there...Bush Sr., the oil magnate, may have employed Oswald's "friend" George deMohrenschildt...and Bush Sr. headed the CIA in the 1970s, just in time to shred plenty of paper that might otherwise have fallen into the hands of the Church or Rockefeller committees or, worse yet, the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
As Marrs points out, any country that just rolls over and lets its president die like a dog in the street deserves all the Bushes it gets.