UBC: Steven M. Gillon, Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live

Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live: Oswald, Kennedy, and the Conspiracy that Will Not Die by Steven M. Gillon

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Unfortunately, this book reads like a cheap knock-off of Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin: trying to do the same thing for JFK's assassination that Sides did for MLK, but without either Sides' attention to detail or his ability to make all his disparate strands of narrative into something coherent.

I also admit, I got off on the wrong metaphorical foot with Gillon because he starts the book with an anecdote about Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy, Jr. (Castro tells JFK Jr. off the record that he, Castro, could never have allowed Oswald into Cuba), and he says in the endnote, "John, who was a close friend, shared this story with the author shortly after John's return from Cuba" (168). Anecdotes--leaving aside the New Historicist rhetorical maneuver of using an opening anecdote to give an essay thematic structure--are not evidence, and even if they were, this one isn't evidence of anything except that Castro, in 1997, still felt guilt and anxiety about JFK's death. Gillon has a wild hare that he chases--his speculation that Cuban intelligence agents working in the Cuban embassy in Mexico may have encouraged Oswald in his plan to kill Kennedy--which this anecdote ostensibly is (not) evidence for, but honestly, it feels like the point of the anecdote is in that endnote: "John, who was a close friend..."

And let's not even get me started on how pretentious it sounds, in a book published in 2013, to refer to yourself in the 3rd person as "the author."

So, yeah, Gillon rubbed me the wrong way, but that's not why I say this book isn't very good.

It isn't very good because it doesn't do what Hellhound on His Trail does. The narrative is surfacey and careless (was Oswald's rifle rolled in a blanket in his garage or in a carpet? Gillon switches in the space of a line (63); there are some awful malapropisms: "the Dallas police had set up no parameter and lax security around the jail" (60) (that's also not the only thing wrong with that sentence); Gillon makes gestures at tracking (as an example) Jacqueline Kennedy the same way Sides tracked Coretta Scott King, but he never follows through), and for a book that purports to be a timeline of the last 48 hours of Oswald's life, it's astonishingly bad at providing clear signposts about what happened when and in what order.

I don't actually know a great deal about the Kennedy assassination, beyond what "everybody knows," so I can't judge how well Gillon does at addressing all of the facts, or whether his debunking of various conspiracy theories holds water itself. I do appreciate the fact that the debunking is there.

The book left me with an untidy, dissatisfied feeling. Granted, its subject matter is untidy and dissatisfying--but an incoherent subject does not automatically result in an incoherent book, and really, the more incoherent the subject, the harder the writer should be trying--not to make the subject coherent, but to make his/her own project coherent. I've used The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York and The Murder of Helen Jewett as a compare-and-contrast pair, and this book pairs with Hellhound on His Trail in the same way. The gap between them is the gap where good historiography does or does not happen.



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