David Lovett, Washington lawyer, lobbyist, and association executive, scrutinized the manuscript with exquisite care and went far above and beyond the call of duty to assist me. He is an expert on the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations, and he owns what I believe is the finest and largest private library in the world on the murder of JFK. In his spare time, he is one of the top historical researchers in Washington and one of the city’s best-kept secrets. He threw open the doors and gave me total access to his vast archive. Whatever I needed—books, pamphlets, documents, images, recordings, ephemera, or objects of material culture—he provided. He is more knowledgeable than anyone alive about the bibliography and historiography of the Kennedy assassination. We have been friends for almost thirty years, and he is the only person I know who matches my obsessive zeal for tracking down obscure historical rarities. His uncanny research skills made End of Days a better book. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, David gave his “last full measure of devotion” to this project, and for that I thank him.
My friend Richard Thomas narrated all three audio books in this series. He is one of the finest actors of his generation and, whether he was busy in theater, television, or film, Richard always took the time to lend his great American voice to my words. His artistic choices made the text come alive. No one could have done it better, and I thank him for his generosity.
The late Wesley J. Liebeler, my professor and mentor at the UCLA School of Law, served as an assistant counsel on the Warren Commission. His insights provided a rare insider’s perspective on the murder. Jim had an irreverent and irrepressible sense of humor, and I wish he were around today to read how some of the more outré conspiracy theorists have theorized that I, as Jim’s protégé, must be part of the government conspiracy to cover up the true history of the Kennedy assassination. I miss Jim’s maniacal, cackling laugh. I owe him much. Not only did Jim pass on to me the secrets of the Warren Commission, he gave me something far more precious. He introduced me to my wife.
Fellow UCLA Law alumnus Vincent Bugliosi is one of the finest prosecutors in American history. Vince, a three-time Edgar Award winner, is the author of one of the best nonfiction crime books ever written, one that is also one of the most frightening books of the twentieth century, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. His monumental Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is one of the most important books about the event. He is a remarkable and generous friend, and I have enjoyed our long conversations about the events surrounding November 22.
Thanks to former editor of the Los Angles Times Shelby Coffey III and the great investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein for an unforgettable conversation about Lee Harvey Oswald and the evidence against him. Ed is a brilliant historian of the assassination and his books are essential reading.
I am indebted to Clinton J. Hill, United States Secret Service, for several conversations about what he saw and did on the afternoon of November 22. He is a great American, and a brave but humble man. No one misses President Kennedy more than Clint Hill. He was there, and he knows.
John Seigenthaler and Charles Overby extended many courtesies to me in Nashville and Washington, D.C. John talked about what it was like to know John and Robert Kennedy, and he shared stories about being alone with them in JFK’s last house in Georgetown. His insights on Jackie Kennedy were priceless. John speaks with touching eloquence about what it felt like to live through November 22.
Thanks to Tom Ingram, former editor in chief of Nashville’s David Lipscomb High School newspaper, for providing me with an original issue of the Pony Express extra that covered the Kennedy assassination.
Jessica Kline assisted me with gracious expertise and good humor whenever I needed help with computer problems. Amy Hart was invaluable in producing all the printed materials I needed to revise the manuscript from first to final draft.
My literary agent and good friend Richard Abate worked tirelessly to bring End of Days to publication. The great agents believe that once they sell a book, their work is not done—it has just begun. This is our sixth book together. On all of them, Richard has stood beside me and he has, with great taste, humor and a historian’s eye, made them better books. I always look forward to our strategy sessions at our favorite classic New York City steakhouses.
My editor Henry Ferris has been with me on all three of my books about presidential history. By now I have inflicted upon him a century’s worth of American tragedy, death, and mourning. I promise that someday I will write a happier book. Until then, I owe him my thanks for his patience, kindness, and invaluable contributions along the way.
Henry’s lieutenant Cole Hager assisted in gathering the photos, bringing the manuscript to final draft for publication, and getting it into production. During a hectic process he was always cool under fire, and I thank him.
Sharyn Rosenblum has been with me on all my books and remains the best publicist in the business. I have fond memories of a memorable dinner at Martin’s Tavern, where we outlined the campaign for this book, and then went on a midnight walk past John and Jackie Kennedy’s last Georgetown house a few blocks away, before strolling down to the old C & O Canal. The spirit of the Kennedys still lingers in their old neighborhood.
Martin’s still serves customers at the same tables once occupied by Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, Richard Nixon, and a young unmarried senator named John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy dined their alone, he often sat at the first table to the right—the half booth or “rumble seat.” Legend has it that he proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier at another window booth in the restaurant. My friends at Martin’s—owner Billy Martin and manager Joseph Filosa—have for years been hospitable hosts to me, and to the ghosts of Camelot who still dine there.
At the Monocle, the famous Capitol Hill restaurant and watering hole for several generations of American political and government leaders, owner John Valanos and manager Nick Selimos gave me a home away from home during the time I wrote End of Days, and all my other books.
Thanks to my first-class legal team of Eric S. Brown and Michael I. Rudell, and also Jonathan D. Lupkin. I can always rely upon their counsel.
Thanks to my friend and fellow Washingtonian Mark Vargas for his energetic promotion of my books. We have spent hours in conversation discussing our mutual fascination with 1960s American politics, John Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Sean Langille explained to me the mysteries of social media and other new forms of communication.
It was Douglas Brinkley who first suggested, one day in the summer of 2007 as we stood together on a Washington, D.C., street corner, that I write about the Kennedy assassination someday. He also gave valuable suggestions on how to think about this story. On another occasion, we enjoyed a marathon dinner where we talked about the life and legend of Jackie Kennedy.
I can trace the origins of this book back further, to my childhood. In the fall of 1963, I was almost five years old. I remember nothing of November 22, although that afternoon I must have been at home, watching news coverage with my mother. I do remember this. Across the street from our house lived my two favorite childhood playmates, Ourania and Evanthia Malliris. The girls were a few years older than I. Their father was a conservative Greek grocer who did not allow them to watch television. His daughters, he dreamed, would attend prestigious universities one day—Harvard was one of the ones he mentioned—and idling in front of a TV screen had no part in that plan. On Sunday, November 24, my mother told me that the girls were coming over to our house because they had received special permission to watch something on television. It must very important, I thought, and I asked why. My mother said that the president of the United States had died, and that we were going to watch a horse-drawn carriage carry his coffin to the U.S. Capitol and then watch the memorial service there.
Several years later my mother, Dianne, led me led me to what she called her “morgue”: a tall, floor-to-ceiling closet with a sliding door that concealed several shelves piled with vintage
newspapers, magazines, picture books, photographs, and ephemera. She was a painter, and these were some of her references and sources for ideas. When I was eight or nine years old, I discovered a treasure trove in that closet—her time capsule of materials that she had collected about the assassination of president Kennedy. Mesmerized, I paged through old Life and Look magazines from the fall of 1963. With care, I opened long-folded newspapers, their pages browned and brittle, and read their frightening headlines. I did not know much about President Kennedy, and did not understand the significance of everything I saw, but I knew from my mother’s tears that something terrible had happened.
Every year, when late November came around, my father, Lennart Swanson, shared with me his memories of the day President Kennedy was shot and entranced me with stories about where he was at 12:30 P.M.—in Larsen’s restaurant on the northwest side of Chicago—and what had happened there and in the city that afternoon and evening. He bought me the Kennedy “Eternal Flame” plug-in, electric night-light pictured in this book. He also gave me the bright-red steel Chicago American newspaper vending rack that I wrote about in the book and that remains, to this day, filled with a stack of copies of the edition from that unforgettable Friday afternoon.
And so I thank my parents, who inspired me long ago to tell the story that you now hold in your hands.
James L. Swanson
Edgartown, Massachusetts
August 1, 2013
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A NOTE ON SOURCES
The bibliography of the Kennedy assassination is enormous. There are thousands of books, magazines, pamphlets, and articles on the subject. No bibliography has ever listed them all. No library owns them all. One of the finest and most extensive collections in the world is not even in a public institution, and is the private library assembled by Washington, D.C., attorney, lobbyist, and association executive David Lovett. In addition to these published sources, millions of pages of documents in government files and elsewhere pertain to the assassination of President Kennedy. No person has read them all. No one ever will. Thus, any general reader who wishes to learn more about the subject must be selective.
On November 22, 1963, the American people experienced the assassination of John F. Kennedy as a shared event. People learned the news in a limited number of ways: by word of mouth; by telephone; by listening to the radio; by watching small, black-and-white television sets that received no more than four or five channels; and by reading daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines. On the same day and at about the same time, almost the entire nation read the same stories, saw the same photographs, and watched the same televised images. For four days straight, the three national television news networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—immersed the American people in a shared moment of national grief. For the first time in U.S. history, the medium of television unified a country through saturation coverage of a historic event. Similarly, the great weekly photojournalism magazines, Look, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post, published images and stories seen by tens of millions of people.
Once the story was over, people did not throw away their old newspapers and magazines. Instead, they preserved them as iconic family heirlooms, as time capsules for future generations. All over the country, people put them away in basements, closets, and attics, where they can still be found today. There is no better way to learn how America experienced the assassination of President Kennedy than by going back to these original sources. As you turn the pages of these old publications, now unparalleled artifacts of how the death of the president was reported and experienced, you will travel back in time and know what it was like to be alive on November 22, 1963. Later, the two major wire services released oversized, commemorative hardcover books that seemed to find their way into half the households in America. From United Press International came Four Days: The Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy, and from the rival Associated Press came The Torch Is Passed: The Associated Press Story of the Death of a President. Across the nation, local newspapers mailed millions of copies of these low-priced books to their subscribers.
The first major book on the Kennedy assassination was the Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (known popularly as the “Warren Report”). Published in 1964 by the official U.S. government commission appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the Kennedy assassination, and chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Report consists of one volume of findings supported by twenty-six volumes of testimony, evidence, and exhibits. The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, that he acted alone, and that there was no evidence that he was part of a conspiracy. The publication of the Warren Report inaugurated a deluge of books on the Kennedy assassination that has not subsided to this day.
The following bibliography lists most of the books that I consulted while researching End of Days. For readers who want to learn more, I recommend several titles. The twenty-seven volumes published by the Warren Commission remain an essential source. Often dismissed by critics as out of date or ridiculed by the conspiracy minded as part of the cover-up, these volumes cannot be ignored, and contain vital information. Few people have ever actually read them. The unwieldy set occupied an entire shelf, and the books were expensive and difficult to cross-reference. Today, the work of the Warren Commission is available in searchable, electronic form.
For more on the sites connected to the assassination, including the Texas School Book Depository, and for a brief introduction to the story, see Conover Hunt’s Dealey Plaza National Historic Landmark Including the Sixth Floor Museum.
The majority of books published on the Kennedy assassination advance one conspiracy theory or another. The two best non-conspiratorial books are Gerald Posner’s Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For readers deterred by the titanic size of the Bugliosi book, I recommend his shorter account, Four Days in November. For a brief and excellent introduction to the subject, on how it was reported, and for insightful commentary on the history and psychology of JFK assassination conspiracy theories, see Peter Knight’s The Kennedy Assassination. For an incisive analysis that places these theories within the larger context of the modern obsession with conspiracy interpretations of a number of twentieth-century events, see Knight’s Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files.
Investigative journalist Edward J. Epstein remains one of the most important scholars of the Kennedy assassination. Beginning in 1966 with his landmark book Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, Epstein—neither a conspiracy theorist nor an apologist for the Warren Commission—has asked skeptical questions about the events of November 22, 1963. His three books on the subject have been collected into one volume, The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend.
The two pioneering and encyclopedic books on November 22 to 25, William Manchester’s Death of a President and Jim Bishop’s The Day Kennedy Was Shot,are as compelling today as they were when they were published in the 1960s.
For more on the life of JFK, begin with James N. Giglio’s The Presidency of John F. Kennedy and Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963. For a compelling narrative on the odd life of Lee Harvey Oswald, written by a journalist who knew Oswald and his wife, Marina (and, strangely, John F. Kennedy too), see Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s Marina and Lee. For another arresting account of Oswald, see Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery. Marina and Lee and Oswald’s Tale remain two of the best five or six books ever written on the Kennedy assassination.
Thomas Mallon’s Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy remains one of my favorite books on the subject. More than almost any work on the subject, it resurrects the emotions of that terrible day in Dallas, fifty years ago.
GENERAL REFERENCES
Adler, Bill. The Eloquent Jacqu
eline Kennedy Onassis: A Portrait in Her Own Words. New York: William Morrow & Company, 2004.
———. The Uncommon Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1996.
Allison, Graham, and Philip Zelikow. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Longman, 1999.
Alsop, Stewart. The Center: People and Power in Political Washington. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968.
———. Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage. New York: William Morrow, 1996.
———. Jackie After Jack. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1998.
Amrine, Michael. This Awesome Challenge: The Hundred Days of Lyndon Johnson. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964.
Anderson, Christopher. Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage. New York: William Morrow, 1996.
Beschloss, Michael, ed. Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. New York: Hyperion, 2011.
Bradford, Sarah. America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. New York: Viking Press, 2000.
Bradlee, Benjamin. That Special Grace. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1964.
Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–1965. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Brown, Thomas. JFK: The History of an Image. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Caro, Robert A. The Years of Lyndon Johnson; The Passage of Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Collier, Peter, and David Horowitz. The Kennedys: An American Drama. New York: Summit Books, 1984.
Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 2003.
Davis, John H. Jacqueline Bouvier: An Intimate Memoir. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996.
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