A Cruel and Shocking Act
The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination
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3.5 • 63 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking, explosive account of the Kennedy assassination that will rewrite the history of the 20th century's most controversial murder investigation
The questions have haunted our nation for half a century: Was the President killed by a single gunman? Was Lee Harvey Oswald part of a conspiracy? Did the Warren Commission discover the whole truth of what happened on November 22, 1963?
Philip Shenon, a veteran investigative journalist who spent most of his career at The New York Times, finally provides many of the answers. Though A Cruel and Shocking Act began as Shenon's attempt to write the first insider's history of the Warren Commission, it quickly became something much larger and more important when he discovered startling information that was withheld from the Warren Commission by the CIA, FBI and others in power in Washington. Shenon shows how the commission's ten-month investigation was doomed to fail because the man leading it – Chief Justice Earl Warren – was more committed to protecting the Kennedy family than getting to the full truth about what happened on that tragic day. A taut, page-turning narrative, Shenon's book features some of the most compelling figures of the twentieth century—Bobby Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Chief Justice Warren, CIA spymasters Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, as well as the CIA's treacherous "molehunter," James Jesus Angleton.
Based on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to the surviving commission staffers and many other key players, Philip Shenon's authoritative, scrupulously researched book will forever change the way we think about the Kennedy assassination and about the deeply flawed investigation that followed.
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2013
Customer Reviews
A put up job
Leans SO heavily on lone nutter dogma, positions LHO as guilty via official canon, with little thought for other contradictory evidence. Enjoyed the photos at the end. Can’t recommend.
A Scholarly Work
A Cruel and Shocking Act appears to be a fact based, well supported behind the scenes view of the Warren Commission, offering invaluable insights into how the Commission got it wrong. The faulty conclusuions appear to be the result of information intentionally withheld from the Commission from the highest levels of government including the FBI, CIA and State Department moticated by CYA behavior and perhaps a desire not to bring the world to tthe brink of extinction, had the full truth come out at the time.
This book is one of the more fact based, well documentd accounts I ve read over the last 50+ years since being glued to the family television beginning on “that fateful Friday” when I was home from school with the flew, as a 4th grader and watched all the significant events unfold on national tv…..
A must-read for JFK assassination students
A particularly insightful and robust accounting of the Warren investigation. This book's perspective of evidence I've read dozens of times before sheds new light on key pieces of the puzzle, for instance, the Zapruder film and it's relation to the "magic bullet theory".