GoodReads Top 200 Best 21st Century Nonfiction, 2021. Pulitzer Prize in History nominee, 2018. Ranked Second on Amazon Bestseller list, Presidents category, March 2017. Historians place the assassination of John F. Kennedy among the biggest watershed events of the 20th century. While numerous books cover the 1963 tragedy from a conspiracy or lone-assassin viewpoint, this work by veteran journalist Kevin James Shay focuses on presenting what occurred between Kennedy's 1960 presidential triumph and his assassination in an objective manner. The narrative, infused with behind-the-scenes details that have been brought to light in recent years, provides a compelling account that is particularly geared towards the average reader, not the assassination researcher. Shay witnessed Kennedy's funeral in Washington, D.C., as a boy and grew up in Dallas. He has researched the killing off and on since 1978, when eyewitness Bill Newman entered his college newspaper office and led him on a search. While Shay leans about lean 75 percent toward the conspiracy side, he is almost 100 percent certain that Oswald was involved in some way. Whether he was a patsy, government informant, or actually fired his rifle at Kennedy remains up in the air. Even some lone-assassin believers admit that the evidence against Oswald back then was circumstantial enough that a good lawyer would have gotten an acquittal. There are many questions about the evidence, cover-up by LBJ and the Warren Commission, the people who saw Ruby and Oswald together, the threats in Chicago, Florida, and other places, and more, that make the conspiracy side more believable. Shay unearths some information not highlighted much before, such as other assassination attempts on Kennedy's life and the involvement of Willie Somersett. The Klan leader opposed the racial violence in the 1950s and 1960s to the point that he risked his life exposing and helping to prevent it as a government informant. He likely helped save and prolong Kennedy's life at least once.
