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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.7307291
EAN num: 9781890862015
ISBN number: 1890862010
Label: Bancroft Press
Manufacturer: Bancroft Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 512
Printing Date: November 25, 1998
Publishing house: Bancroft Press
Sale Popularity Level: 298896
Studio: Bancroft Press
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Humiliated at the Bay of Pigs, John and Robert Kennedy sought desperately to eliminate Castro. Their strategies for overthrowing the Cuban leader were so elaborate and bizarre, they could only engender paranoia. Castro openly threatened to retaliate. Pro-Castro agitator Lee Harvey Oswald learned that Robert Kennedy was personally supervising groups plotting against the Cuban leader. Filled with rage and a sense of destiny, Oswald went to the Cuban embassy in Mexico, announcing he would kill America's president in exchange for sanctuary in Havana. Live By the Sword forces the conclusion that members of the Cuban regime accepted the troubled American's offer.
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Rated by buyers 
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Gus Russo, a nice guy but intelligence connected (to put it mildly), has authored this book that, while filled with some worthwhile material, also has its share of spurious notions and so forth. On the subject, "Ultimate Sacrirfice" is far superior. Still, worth a (careful) look.
Vince Palamara
Secret Service expert, History Channel, author of 2 books, in over 32 other author's books, etc.
Rated by buyers 
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A more recent book by Leary and Seymour holds updated information that punches a hole in Russo's "Oswald did it alone" thesis. If that were all (or primarily) the content of this book, one might dispense with it. But it isn't. The main focus is on the terrorist campaign waged against Cuba by the Kennedys. Here the book contains a great deal of concisely documented material. This is then plausibly raised as something which could have motivated Oswald. When going through the actual evidence of the assassination, Russo points out relevant evidence which discredits the "grassy knoll" thesis. This has been further supplemented by Leary and Seymour, who likewise reject the popular "grassy knoll" thesis. Yet having come up with enough motives for why someone might be compelled to carry out assassination, and having discredited one very popular thesis, Russo seems satisfied in letting a question go. There is a point when, in discussing the assassination, he simply says that it would take too long to explain right here how he became convinced of the "single bullet theory" and so he is giving a "thumbnail sketch" in Appendix A. At this point, one can detect some logical incompleteness, although he does discredit some of the more popular myths about the assassination, but it isn't surprising to see Leary & Seymour producing newly released evidence supporting a wider "assassination plot" view. What is more to the point about this book is that it is centrally focused on the Kennedy role in the terrorist campaign against Cuba. On this matter, it corrects a number of errors in the earlier (still worthwhile) book by Hinkle and Turner, such as the point where RFK feigns surprise at the CIA being involved with the Mafia against Cuba. As documents have been released since the Stone film, the Camelot myth has become more and more what used to be called "an old wives' tale." This book sheds much light on why, but more complete information is needed if one is specifically looking at the assassination.
Rated by buyers 
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Gus Russo is a man of many views, all of them contradictory. In the early 1990's, he embraced every conspiracy theory known to man, and was even listed as a "consultant" on Oliver Stone's JFK. He was a firm believer in the Stone school of conspiracy theories. He also endorsed Robert Morrow's dubious book "First Hand Knowledge" with a cover blurb. Then, came his conversion. After Gerald Posner's "Case Closed", Russo realized there was more money to be made in endorsing the opposite, i.e. "official", point of view espoused by the Warren Commission. Russo reversed himself 180 degrees and began hanging around with former CIA types who had been involved in the assassination plots against Fidel Castro (and possibly JFK as well). He was flattered by their attention and bought into their propaganda and disinformation. Hence this book. The book contains several theories, all contradictory: 1) Oswald did it, acting alone, 2) Castro was behind the assassination, and 3) It was all Bobby Kennedy's fault!! Russo also tried to persuade Seymour Hersh, and the Assassination Review Board, that the real assassin was a Cuban intelligence agent, but failed to convince either. Russo is being used, and is not to be trusted. His sources are dubious at best and have their own agenda. Don't believe everything you read.
Rated by buyers 
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This book is a remarkable piece of scholarship that provides the most thorough backdrop yet to the JFK assassination. I found the most significant part of the book to be the deep politics going on in the JFK administration. My worldview has been forever changed in learning that the character deficits of Bobby Kennedy and his obsession with getting Castro ultimately forced the Cubans to accept Soviet missiles for their own protection. Although I was taught that the Kennedy brothers heroically averted Armageddon in November 1962, it was their arrogance and inexperience that had actually pushed us to the brink in the very first place! Thank you, Mr. Russo!!
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" Take the blue pill, and you continue the virtual life you had, without any memory of this meeting. Take the purple pill, and I'll show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes . . ." [From the 1999 film "MATRIX"]
Contrary to the editor's claim, this is not the last book you will want to read on Dealey Plaza. And if one only wants to explore secondary materials, the Truth is scattered around in bits and pieces. Some of it is in the histories and files of foreign and domestic intelligence agencies. Some of it surfaces in new document releases. Some of it emerges in memoirs and biographies written by those close to the several decades of investigations. But you won't find all of it in a single book. Here, I only insinuate why that state of affairs persists.
The dawn of the 1990s. Stone previews "JFK" to Congress. Congress passes the 1992 JFK Records Collection Act. The lame-duck president stonewalls implementing the Act within its 90-day mandate for appointing an Assassination Records Review Board. Clinton is inaugurated. The original candidate list is "missing", and Clinton solicits another, appointing the ARRB about the time that Starr replaces Fiske as independent prosecutor.
The American news machine spins up to high revs, with headlines about Whitewater, Travelgate and Vince Foster. Starr is grasping at straws, hoping to find charges that stick. His closest advisors ask him to drop it, but he doesn't. By 1996, Starr looks foolish, and Richard Scaife, who supposedly has intelligence connections from the early 1960s, finds Starr a job-offer at Pepperdine University. Starr decides to stay on to pick at presidential scandal-scabs.
All along, ARRB is quietly holding hearings. A continuous flow of documents accumulating to 3 million in number pass through the ARRB process. They are declassified from CIA, State, FBI, NSA, and Pentagon, then transferred to National Archives. Small items appear in the papers, buried by the Clinton scandal headlines: ZR/RIFLE-- a collaborative assassination project between CIA and Mafia against Castro; Gerald Ford altering Warren Report evidence fixing the location of JFK's back-wound; a tug-of-war over possession of the Zapruder film.
The Act absolves key figures in assassination research from CIA non-disclosure agreements, and other witnesses come forward: Col. L. Fletcher Prouty -- Stone's "Mr. X"; Gaeton Fonzi, former investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations; Marita Lorenz, friend of Watergate burglar and caribbean assassin Frank Sturgis. Prouty publishes "JFK", pointing a finger at "General Y" -- Maj. Gen. E.G. Lansdale. Fonzi's "The Last Investigation" goes to press, opening a floodgate of leads, as he reveals the connection between Lee Oswald, Antonio Veciana, and David Atlee Phillips, CIA Director of the Western Hemisphere before the Watergate aftermath precipitated his retirement. Even Marita, who had been Castro's girlfriend at CIA's behest, publishes her book with the help of a collaborator. ARRB is releasing many documents; the puzzle-pieces are falling together, but the public allows a moral microscope of scandalous headlines to deflect its chronically deficit attention.
Starr's investigation falters. Something else is needed, because nobody anticipates a certainty of finding a news-gem like Monica Lewinsky. The ARRB is about to release the long-suppressed files of the HSCA, substantiating Fonzi's book -- the keystone puzzle-piece. Someone must act fast.
Seymour Hersh says he took five years to put together "Dark Side of Camelot", but he gathers most of his interviews during 1996 and 1997, when the book appears in print. Star witnesses in Hersh's book? Clare Luce for one, asserting that Joe Kennedy Sr. and Henry Luce were as chummy as Abbott and Costello. That story-line spotlights unlikely political bedfellows, and the Luces are one of two families highly suspect at a level above Lansdale and Phillips. Another Hersh witness? J Edgar Hoover, definitely a kingpin in the coverup conspiracy -- a man who had been in Meyer Lansky's pocket, because photos in Lansky's possession depicted Hoover and Tolson in flagrante delicto. Hersh's smear of Kennedy is substantial, and Generation X conservatives become dupes of a new era, conditioned by decades of reflex pre-propaganda associating "conspiracy" with "nut" and "dupe" with "communist".
So here comes Gus Russo -- surfing the document declassification waves, carrying the weighty tome "Live By the Sword". He renews the original Roselli-Martino-Phillips onion-peel cover-story of "culprit: Castro". But the new documents are a proverbial cat-out-of-bag: Russo needs to explain ZR/RIFLE, so he augments the old story, concluding that Castro made ZR/RIFLE backfire. Splendid! Russo has littered the publishing landscape with conspiracy-theory casualties; the Clinton declassifications are discredited, now that thirty years' collective work ... Read More
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