Philip Shenon

Shenon's A Cruel and Shocking Act is less about the Kennedy assassination than a history of the investigation of the assassination, specifically the work of the Warren commission. I've read a bit about the Kennedy assassination - most memorably, Vince Bugliosi's 1800-page, minute-by-minute account. But I'd never really thought about how the Warren Commission did its work. The interplay of politics and personalities Shenon presents was fascinating.

In the process of researching the show more Commission, Shenon got access to recently declassified documents that pointed him to the possibility that Oswald had significant contacts with Cuban diplomats and intelligence agents. And worse, the CIA, who likely knew this, deliberately hid it from the Warren Commission. Did Oswald have support from Cuba? Was he an agent of Cuba or the Soviet Union?

A Cruel and Shocking Act is best in the parts dealing with the people of the Warren Commission - the commissioners, the managers of the work, and the young, bright, energetic staffers who did the real work. This is where Shenon shines. show less

Papal biography through the lens of Vatican II. John XXIII is the hero it's impossible not to love. His anti-hero is Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, who reminded me of the Bad Cardinal in CONCLAVE. That movie floated through my mind frequently during this book.

I was occasionally zoning out over a lot of the details over 500 pages - the Vatican fights, the bios of minor players, all the sex abuse scandals and all the Latin American drama.

I had no idea how close we were to having the Church show more approving the use of birth control! And I had no idea what a wimpy and fearful and anti-reform personality Paul VI was - the first pope of my lifetime, from 1963-1978.

One thing I appreciated about the structure of the book was how every pope's life story was jumbled together chronologically - you learned all about Ratzinger and Wojtyla through the years of Vatican II while it was happening, for example; instead of just taking each pope in a vacuum getting his own section. I liked instead how this showed the flow of history and provided a lot of background of the popes before they were popes, situated within their times.

And boy, Paul VI was bad, but John Paul II was a real horror show in this book. I kept flashing back to something a girl said in one of my high school religion classes - this was the 80s - "He wants to take the church BACKWARD instead of forward; he won't even HEAR about women in the priesthood - I think he's one of the worst popes we've ever had!" You didn't come out and say this in religion class at my school... but the more I read about him, the more I thought, "Damn, you were right, Kerry!"

Unfortunately, John XXIII and the forward-looking hopes of Vatican II end up feeling like the aberration over recent history, rather than the other way around. The author has an agenda - this is not simply a book of papal biography, but a narrative about our loss when we lost John XXIII and what the Church could have been. He never makes this parallel, but I was certain thinking about JFK, who died within months of John XXIII, and also took with him the possibility of a much different course of history that we will never know the extent of.

Bergoglio (Francis I) was interesting. His humility was irresistible. Ratzinger (Benedict) was also interesting in how his reform-mindedness in youth turned to fear and shutting down of dissent during his papacy - interesting, but not likeable. There was a LOT about Ratzinger here. I was much more interested whenever we turned to Bergoglio. Guess I put Francis I as my 'favorite' pope since John XXIII. But the book ended during his reign and didn't cover our Leo. Who knows what his papacy may hold? We may get birth control yet? show less

A history of the Warren Commission, and through that, a history of the Kennedy assassination. It shows in painstaking detail that Oswald was the lone shooter. It is much more ambiguous on Oswald's motives. Shenon shows that the CIA did not share all of its info on Oswald and his connections to communists and meetings with communists in Mexico City prior to the assassination. Still, we do not know for certain what Oswald was doing, who he was talking to, and exactly why he shot Kennedy. show more Shenon doesn't come out and say it, but, I now believe that, at the very least, Oswald boasted he would kill Kennedy in a bid to be allowed into Cuba or back to the U.S.S.R. Basically, Oswald thought, if I kill the guy, the communists will see I am a serious revolutionary and I will be famous and fêted. I think some Cuban functionaries, some Soviet sources, and some CIA guys new of the threat in advance, but didn't think Oswald would do it. Then they covered their butts. That's the least and highly probable, I think, after reading this book. To push a little more, perhaps some communist functionaries pushed Oswald to do it, maybe even promised or gave support, but didn't think he'd really do it. And, one last thing, I think it's possible Oswald received some sort of sleeper agent training when he was in the Soviet Union. True, the Soviets considered Oswald a slob, dumb, and a poser, but he could be used as a useful idiot. A patsy. show less

A Cruel and Shocking Act by Philip Shenon
review date 11-17-2013

“What is clear to me is that over the last fifty years - actually more than fifty years, since parts of this narrative are set well before November 22, 1963 - senior officials of the United States government, most especially the CIA, have lied about the assassination and the events that led to it.” So says Philip Shenon in his exhaustively researched “A Cruel and Shocking Act”.

Beginning with a brief review of the show more assassination itself, the book then becomes for most of its length a meticulous history of the Warren Commission from its creation in the weeks following the assassination of President Kennedy, through the presentation of its findings to President Johnson on September 24, 1964. The commission itself comes across (for the most part) as a group committed to finding and reporting the truth surrounding the events of the assassination. The junior members of the Warren Commission are especially (and rightfully) praised for their diligence and tireless efforts to leave no stone unturned in their quest to find the whole truth.

Conversely, the Dallas Police, the FBI, the CIA, and Chief Justice Earl Warren come under severe criticism for their failings, both deliberate and accidental, in their handling of key evidence and witnesses crucial to the Commission. Warren’s refusal to pursue a tough line in questioning Marina Oswald and his supreme deference to the Kennedy family’s wishes can be forgiven somewhat - he should never have been the head of the Commission in the first place. The Dallas Police’s failure to protect Lee Harvey Oswald to the point where he was killed right under their noses is unforgivable. Mistakes and evidence-tampering done by the FBI seem more coincidental with agent’s desires to keep bad news away from J.Edgar Hoover. As one reads more and more though, the actions of the CIA seem deliberate, pre-planned, and maliciously directed to deceive and obfuscate the truth.

The later portion of the book (the Aftermath and Author’s Notes sections) contain information that was brand new to me and would most likely have been revelatory to members of the Warren Commission had the CIA allowed the details of Oswald’s trip to Mexico City over the last week of September 1963 to be known. Was there contact between Oswald and a KGB assassination expert? Did Oswald discuss his plans with officials of the Cuban embassy? Was Oswald promised anything in return for killing President Kennedy? Such intriguing questions… unfortunately, thanks to the bungling of the Dallas Police and the deceitfulness of the CIA, we’ll probably never know the answers to these and a thousand other questions that refuse to go away.

It appears that (for the most part) the public has come to accept the Warren Commission’s findings that a lone gunman with a high-powered rifle, namely Lee Harvey Oswald, fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Book Depository building, killing President Kennedy and severely wounding Governor Connolly. That’s the version of events that I believe. Unfortunately though, that’s only the beginning of the story.

Terrific book, worthy of a re-read some day. show less