Word: assassinates
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While this lapse--and others--results either from myopia, misinformation, or verbal hysteria, the handling of the actual events of the assassination and the assassin is more disturbing. The author's explanation is smug. The Warren Commission's most controversial theory--that one bullet hit both Kennedy and Gov. Connally--is not challenged. Despite Connally's recollection that the first shot did not hit him, Manchester writes "it had passed through...Connally's back, chest, right wrist, and left thigh, although the Governor, suffering a delayed reaction, was not yet aware of it." Certainly Connally may be wrong and Manchester...
More provoking is the author's refusal to consider the possibility that an assassin may have been firing at Kennedy from the grassy knoll in the front of the Presidential limousine. Manchester never even confronts the possibility that the bullet which killed the President may have come from the front of the car. He does, however, speak all too graphically of parts of Kennedy's scalp flying backward...
Robert Oswald, brother of the assassin, recalled how, during his last visit with Lee Oswald in the Dallas police station, he suddenly realized that Lee "was really unconcerned. I was looking into his eyes, but they were blank, like Orphan Annie's . . . He knew what was happening, because as I searched his eyes he said to me, 'Brother, you won't find anything there...
Manchester has no doubts that the Warren Commission's single-assassin finding is correct. He reports, however, that Jackie Kennedy's first reaction to her husband's death was to wish that it was caused by a widespread plot, for then "there would be an air of inevitability about the tragedy; then she could persuade herself that if the plotters had missed on Elm Street they would have eventually succeeded elsewhere...
...after the assassination of John F. Kennedy '40, Daniel P. Moynihan, now director of the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies, sensed the possible murder of alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald if he remained in Dallas...